Fedihost offers several plans for Mastodon hosting depending on your needs. You can view the pricing for each plan as well as an up-to-date estimate of how many users each plan can support on the pricing page.

Note that the number of users listed for each plan are suggestions. For the average use case, those numbers are appropriate. If your use case is different, you may want to consider getting a higher or lower tier plan.

Upgrading/downgrading your plan

If you find that your plan isn't powerful enough or is too expensive for your needs, you can easily change your plan - just select the service in your dashboard, then under the Plan tab, select the new plan you would like. You may have to restart your server under the Details tab before the new plan is applied to your instance.

Why isn't there a free tier?

Mastodon has high base resource usage. An ordinary web server just idles waiting for a connection from a web browser, sending back the content the user requested (such as a particular webpage). Mastodon has to do this, but also constantly look for new posts, categorize them as they come in, and do cleanup and maintenance tasks.

Example: It may be helpful to think of Mastodon like an office space. You can have a small or a big office which cost different amounts in rent and upkeep, but if you want any office at all you'll need to pay a base cost, no matter how many people use it. The lights need to stay on and the internet needs to stay connected, no matter whether one person is in the office or twenty are.

No matter how small an instance is, there's always going to be a non-negligible cost to running it. So, Fedihost can't offer those server resources for free. Still, the plans are generally quite affordable. If you can't justify running a Mastodon instance for yourself, consider making one, and splitting the cost, with several friends.

Better with friends

Mastodon is a service that has a significant base resource usage and then a slight increase in resource usage per additional active user. Because of the high base resource usage, it doesn't usually make sense to run an instance for just yourself. You may be able to get several friends on your instance without upgrading your plan - that way, you make the most of your money. Also, more users on your instance means you get more posts being federated to your instance from other ones.

When to upgrade

Generally, if nothing is going wrong on your instance, you're probably on the right plan. However, if things start failing, you may want to change plan as the one you're on may not be powerful enough for your needs. Here's a list of signs you may need to upgrade your plan.

Fedihost support level

We prioritize support based on plan size and support is provided within reason. Fedihost does not maintain the code that we host on your behalf. Repeated requests for support that are not related to the hosting may be billed at rates outlined in our terms of service.