I’ve been considering the idea of hosting my own instance of Lemmy, solely for my own use, maybe with 1 or 2 family members using it as well. I’ve seen several discussions regarding the requirements for system resources, but not much regarding bandwidth. I have an abundance of processing power, memory, and storage space in my homelab, but my internet connection is terrible. Not much available where I live. I have a 40/3 VDSL connection and a Starlink connection, but neither is particularly good in terms of upload.

Seems like a VPS would be a good solution, but to me, that kind of defeats the purpose of self-hosting. I want to use my own hardware.

So, for a personal-use Lemmy instance, what kind of bandwidth is recommended? I know my connection would be fine for 1 or 2 users, but I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure how servers sync with each other in a federated network, and I could see that using a ton of bandwidth.

  • poVoqEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    You could make a wireguard tunnel to a cheap VPS and connect that via Starlink. Then if you configure nginx on the VPS and allow it to cache most images you can save a lot of bandwidth on your uplink from home. I guess Cloudflare also offers a similar VPN with caching that might be easier to setup.

    I think Starlink itself might actually have sufficient uplink bandwidth, but AFAIK they have a CGNAT so you can’t really host anything on it without the above mentioned trick with a VPS and a VPN tunnel.

    • @ThorrJoEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Then if you configure nginx on the VPS and allow it to cache most images you can save a lot of bandwidth on your uplink from home.

      I’m doing exactly this with a different web app, works great although at this point I just pasted configs together and have no familiarity beyond that.