this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2022
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[Question] How much does Matrix homeserver cost on average? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello, How much does a small matrix server that I and my friends can use cost on average? I will also set up Whatsapp, Signal and Discord bridge on the server.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

If you have a decent internet connection at home, and a spare computer (eg a raspberrypi or something), and you don't mind everyone knowing your home IP address, it could cost as little as $0.

It's also possible to rent a virtual server for the purpose for as little as $5/month, but you'd probably want to spend a few times that to get one with better-than-minimum specs from a reliable/reputable operator.

The biggest expense is the time it takes to maintain it. Becoming an infrastructure provider for other people can become quite a hassle, especially if they come to rely on it and are seriously inconvenienced when you have downtime.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

If you have a decent internet connection at home, and a spare computer (eg a raspberrypi or something), and you don’t mind everyone knowing your home IP address, it could cost as little as $0.

This is not the full picture, you usually still have to pay for electricity and the system itself. It's not free.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

that is true; running a small single-board computer probably adds somewhere between $0.50 to $2 per month to your power bill, depending on the model and the rates in your area, and much more if you use a normal PC instead.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Let's do a quick back of the envelope calculation with 5W for an SBC and 15W for a PC.

5W*24h*30d*0,15€/kWh=0.54€

So an SBC costs you at least 0.54€ if you disregard the network traffic also using up more energy within your network (routers, switches, APs all use more energy if they don't idle around). The regular PC costs you at least 1.62€. And that's for a very cheap energy price – for Germany you can triple that and pay 1.62€ for the SBC and 4.86€ for a PC.

And that's an energy efficient PC! Some of them use 50W in idle, which means you can at least triple the price again. And for 15€ you can get a pretty good Matrix server in Germany which probably has a faster internet connection than you at home ;)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

yep, this is almost exactly the same calculation i just did to arrive somewhere between $0.50 - $2 for an SBC :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

it's always nice to find people I can agree with :)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A basic VPS will only work for a while as they are usually SSD space limited and Matrix likes to blow up it's database size. Of course it depends on the usage and what rooms your users join, and there are some ways to partially scrub the database, but all in all Matrix server costs tend to increase over time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

usually SSD space limited and Matrix likes to blow up it’s database size.

Since v1.61, the Synapse Matrix home server (which I guess you mean with "Matrix" in this case) has gotten new controls to keep the media directory smaller and you can run synapse_janitor SQL commands to reduce the DB size.

all in all Matrix server costs tend to increase over time.

This is correct.

My database of a server running since 2018 or so is about 57GiB in size and I didn't compact it for about a year now. The media directory is 21GiB in size, however I limit uploads to 10MiB.

I guess a server with 100GiB of SSD space is plenty enough if you don't join the largest rooms with >20,000 members. A server with 480GiB RAID-1 costs you about 24€ at kimsufi.com, so that's what I'd plan for to run a Matrix system with a pleasant experience. You still have to do backups, of course, which adds another 10-15€ per month…

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yeah, that fits to the general experience, although maybe worth mentioning that you really need SSD space or otherwise Synapse will be super slow. Also don't cheap out on RAM, as Synapse will easily take 1-2GB just for itself.

It has certainly gotten better, but I still wonder if it is worth it in the end. A XMPP server with similar functionality takes 10-100 times less resources (i.e. happily runs on a 5€/month VPS) and is pretty much maintenance free after setting it up. But of course the bridging situation is a bit better Matrix side right now and joining Matrix rooms through xmpp is not the best experience either (but there is a fork of the official xmpp<->matrix bridge that is improving a lot lately).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It has certainly gotten better, but I still wonder if it is worth it in the end. A XMPP server with similar functionality takes 10-100 times less resources

Yep, that's why I suggested Dendrite. It's in beta, so not 100% functional yet, but way lighter on resources.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Synapse has been very much optimized lately. Dendrite won't save space on media. Probably not on database, and it hasn't been optimized for small memory use yet.

"for instance Synapse uses 5-10x less RAM than it used to (my personal federated server is only using 145MB of RAM atm!" - https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

How does that compare to Dendrite?

Synapse uses 5-10x less RAM than it used to

That's impossible. Maybe it uses 1/5th or 1/10th of the RAM. But if you use 5 times less, that is 500% less, which would amount to Synapse downloading the system 4 times more RAM than it used to use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah, it's an unfortunate expression, but not mine, so I didn't edit when quoting.

Dendrite is still trying to reach spec compliance. IIUC they haven't spent much effort on optimizing resource use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It can be free https://paul.totterman.name/posts/matrix-guide/