If you think this post would be better suited in a different community, please let me know.
Topics could include (this list is not intending to be exhaustive — if you think something is relevant, then please don’t hesitate to share it):
- Moderation
- Handling of illegal content
- Server structure (system requirements, configs, layouts, etc.)
- Community transparency/communication
- Server maintenance (updates, scaling, etc.)
It could be costly in a few places, so choose your host wisely:
I know that R2 has no charge for ingress/egress.
The block and db costs are technically unbounded, and will never decrease by default.
Do you have any particular recommendations for a host?
I can tell you it will be the most expensive on AWS or Azure. That’s about all I could say without pricing stuff out.
I’d look into Hetzner, their pricing is pretty fair and they have some nifty features.
Also check out Vultr, they have block storage and some interesting addons.
That’s where I’d start, but I haven’t needed to host anything like Lemmy.
Do you have any estimations on the relationship between user count and average data transfer rates, and the average rate of storage increase?
It would depend completely on how many users you let in and what kind of things they’ll be doing. Some users are super heavy with uploading images, some users aren’t.
I haven’t read the docs in a long time, but perhaps you could restrict image uploading or something. Nothing you can do about unbounded DB growth without expiring content though.