Where to begin.. It's been an interesting fortnight!
I started hosting [mastodon.nz](https://mastodon.nz) around January 2020 on my home 'server' for myself and few friends. It started off as a small LXC container inside Proxmox with 2 cores and 2GB RAM allocated. It stayed this way until about 6 months ago when I kept having scheduled power outages and I couldn't keep running it from my house while maintaining a reasonable uptime.
{{<imagesrc="/kitchen_server.jpg"caption="\"Server\" - April 2021"src_s="/kitchen_server.jpg"src_l="/kitchen_server_l.jpg">}}
Mid 2021 a good friend of mine offered a great deal on some actual hosting in a datacenter. Now we had 8vCPU + 8GB RAM to play with, time to migrate everything. After a few hours of mastering `rsync` and `pg_dump` - it was done, we were set for a while. At least that's what I thought..
April 2022 brought a nice little surprise - I started getting notifications of new users joining [mastodon.nz](https://mastodon.nz). Confused I started to look at what has changed.. Didn't take long to realise this was only the beginning. I had to allocate more resource to the container to account for the higher throughput.
You can see in the image below it started to approach the allocated 3GB - I bumped it up to 4GB, then shortly after up to 6GB. That's as much as I could give it without moving to bigger hardware. (The drop at the end was a service restart after a version upgrade).
I got an email shortly after from Sendgrid advising that we were approaching their 100 email/day free tier limit. Crap. I managed to upgrade the plan to account for the burst of registrations before any emails started to bounce.
It was about at this time I figured we probably needed to look into the future of mastodon and if we plan on maintaining it long term with a much higher capacity. I jumped on TradeMe and started working out what we could afford and what we needed to maintain a decent growth over the next 12+ months. Boom! Found the perfect thing in our price range. A secondhand HP DL360p Gen8 - With 32 cores and 80GB ram. The only issue is disks. I've never been one to trust secondhand disks. So ended up going over budget and bought 2 x 500GB EVO870's and 2 x 2TB EVO870's to run in a ZFS mirror for storage.
After about 6 hours of configuring and installing everything required, I was ready to make a trip to a local datacenter to rack it (Thanks to previously mentioned friend!) and start the painful migration.
I'm pretty happy overall with how this has turned out. I have just finished configuring nightly off-site backups to b2backblaze (Remember: RAID is not a backup!).
Costs have gone up a little bit. It's still manageable for the time being and I plan on supporting this long term. If you want to help out, feel free to shout me a coffee @ [OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/nz-federated-services).
