At the time of writing, Lemmyworld has the second highest number of active users (compared to all lemmy instances)
Also at the time of writing, Lemmyworld has >99% uptime.
By comparison, other lemmy instances with as many users as Lemmyworld keep going down.
What optimizations has Lemmyworld made to their hosting configuration that has made it more resilient than other instances’ hosting configurations?
See also Does Lemmy cache the frontpage by default (read-only)? on !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
For super cheap, there’s Oracle’s free* servers. Restricted to about 50mbps in bandwidth but doesn’t cost you a penny. Get the ARM server if you can, those 4 cores and 24GB of RAM will serve you well.
For cheap, there are hosting providers like Contabo and Hetzner that will offer you servers for a fair price. You’ll need to do your own backups though!
OVH has some very cheap dedicated servers if you need more performance. Your uplink will be limited to 100mbps but you get dedicated CPU cores, dedicated hard drives/SSDs, dedicated RAM, everything. This comes with the risk that you’ll need to do your own backups because those dedicated components can die and there’s no failover (by default).
It’s hard to say what hardware you’ll actually need, but I’ve read somewhere that lemmy.ml used to run on a machine with 8 CPU cores to serve thousands of users before everyone migrated over. The admin of lemmy.world posts regular updates on how the server is doing, I think the 21k users and all of its federated communities are running on a 32 core CPU with 128GB of RAM. Based on this, 6 cores and 8GB of RAM should be more than enough to serve ±100 users with the responsiveness of the lemmy.world instance (probably better because you’ll have comparatively more bandwidth).
*=free forever but you do need to answer a call from a marketeer
Friggen excellent reply! Thank you! Saving this!