Shared, VPS and managed
The best place to host your Mastodon instance.
One action to install it, media on object storage from the first day, and somebody here who knows which machine it is on. Ubuntu 22.04 underneath. PHP 8.2 since the eighth of December. HTTP/3 on every domain since June, when it stopped being a draft.
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
- AlmaLinux 9
- Rocky Linux 9
- LiteSpeed 6.1
- nginx 1.22
- Redis 7
- TLS 1.3
- CloudLinux OS 8
- Kubernetes 1.25
- Terraform 1.3
- Next.js 13
- WordPress 6.1
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Nine racks in one building. The instances opened in November are on the fourth rack from the left.
On the machines
Current versions, and the dates the old ones stop.
One action, then the boring part
- mastodon-web4.0.2running
- sidekiq6.5.8running
- postgresql15.1running
- redis7.0.5running
- media storeobjectattached
- backup04:10second rack
Mastodon, Nextcloud, Matrix and Umami install from the panel in one action. The instance is the easy part. The media storage is the part that surprises people in week three.
cPanel & WHM 102 on the shared machines and 106 on the managed ones, Plesk Obsidian 18.0.4x if you arrived carrying it, and CloudLinux OS 8 to keep one account's bad afternoon inside that account.
Every machine built this year
22.04
Ubuntu LTS, supported to 2027. AlmaLinux 9 and Rocky Linux 9 are here for the accounts that left CentOS in a hurry.
PHP, and when it stops
7.4 stopped getting security fixes on 28 November and 8.2 arrived on 8 December. There is a compatibility scanner in the panel. It is optimistic.
Runtimes
- Node.js Hydrogen18 LTS
- Python3.11
- Go1.19
- Ruby3.2
Node 18 has fetch in the runtime, so three lines at the top of your script can go. Ruby 3.2 compiles to WebAssembly, which is installed and which we are still deciding how to feel about.
Databases
- PostgreSQL15
- MySQL8.0
- MariaDB10.9
Backups nightly, kept thirty days, written to the second rack. Restores are done by a person and take about an hour, most of which is agreeing which night you meant.
Standards
HTTP/3 became RFC 9114 in June, so we have removed the word draft from this page. The implementation did not change.
TLS 1.3 on every domain, LiteSpeed 6.1 and nginx 1.22 in front of it.
What we pin, and why
Every dependency in our build is pinned to a hash. In January a maintainer sabotaged his own packages, in March another shipped protestware, and in April a continuous-integration provider's tokens were used to read other people's repositories. None of it reached these machines, for the dull reason that nothing here updates itself.
Traffic that arrives like weather
A grid of green and yellow squares filled every timeline in January and was gone by March, about a month after the newspaper bought the game. People still ask us to plan for that shape. We can. It is the shape that ends.
Free tiers, and what happened to them
A free tier is a marketing expense. Several companies found out what theirs cost.
| SlopHost | Heroku | Linode | Cloudways | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | None, and there never was one | Free dynos withdrawn on 28 November | Never offered one | A trial |
| Who owns it in December | The same two directors as in 1996 | Salesforce | Akamai, since February | DigitalOcean, since September |
| Where the machine is | A building we can walk to | An AWS account that is not yours | Their own racks, now somebody else's | Whichever cloud you picked |
StackPath sells the edge rather than the machine, which is a different product from this one and is compared with it weekly. In October a newspaper livestreamed a lettuce beside a photograph of a prime minister to see which would last longer. It was the only uptime graph anybody watched all year.