Monoceros Digital Consulting now offers hosting of privately owned managed Mastodon instances. Mastodon is an open-source federated social media network, letting you create your own private server and link (or “federate”) it up with other servers. Private servers are the perfect way to carve out a small, focused space on the Internet in which to share your views, promote your products, or hang out with your peers.
Service Details
| Media storage | 40 GB |
| Processing threads | 10 (upgradable) |
| Who is responsible for server maintenance? | Monoceros Digital Consulting |
| Who keeps Mastodon up to date? | Monoceros Digital Consulting |
| Who looks after backups? | Monoceros Digital Consulting |
| Who sets the rules for my community? | You |
| Who is in charge of moderation? | You |
Price
| Core service (Web interface, database, media storage) | $15 | per month |
| Additional processing capacity (per ten threads) | $15 | per month |
| Domain name registration and management (if you don’t have your own) | $15 | per year |
| Additional storage | $5 | per 100 GB |
Core Mastodon service
Our basic service starts at $15/month, and is best suited for small businesses and private instances with up to 5 user accounts. Each instance has a generous data storage allowance, enough bandwidth to handle thousands of messages per day, and comes with our personal attention. We do the hard work of keeping the servers healthy, so that you can focus on shaping your community and engaging with your followers.
Additional features
But what happens if your community grows too big for your instance? When more people start signing up new accounts, your existing accounts begin posting more, and all that extra activity causes your instance to fall behind? Simply send us a note and upgrade your service for additional processing capacity. The core service provides ten activity threads, meaning that it can process up to ten messages and notifications simultaneously. Each upgrade adds ten more threads, which we can load without causing any downtime for your users!
Every instance needs space to store images, link previews, accounts profiles and more. Mastodon clears these out when they expire, but a busy instance still needs a lot of space. If your instance exceeds its storage allowance, we’ll let you know. You can either upgrade your storage allowance, or allow us to clear out older files.
How to scale your instance
It is most cost-effective to start small, and take advantage of our easy upgrade path to then add extra capacity until performance stabilizes. The usage figures above are only estimates, based on estimated typical user behaviour. However, actual usage can easily be higher or lower than you might have expected. A so-called “Heavy social media user” can sometimes generate more activity on an instance than all of their neighbours combined. Total activity also grows rapidly with increased user accounts, due to the geometric growth of individual relationships.