How FediHost Media Storage Works

One of the unique things about FediHost is our storage system which can be expanded as you need it and is shared in a pool between your services.

Storage Packs

Every instance of a service by default comes with 10GB of media storage which is enough to get started running your services.

Motivation

Media storage has the highest variability from instance to instance, it largely depends on how an instance is used. A single user instance of Mastodon or PeerTube can use a gigabytes of storage or a terabyte. It made sense to us to decouple it from the other variables which make a price to suit users needs.

Using Storage Packs

Storage pricing is available on the pricing page, when you select your base service you can choose to add more storage if you think you may need it.

You can then upgrade or downgrade your storage at anytime in the FediHost dashboard. If you exceed your storage usage you will receive an email letting you know that your storage is being upgraded to the next media storage tier.

Shared Storage

All of your FediHost storage is shared between your services in a pool.

Motivation

When you setup a VPS or use Managed Hosting you often end up with left over capacity. Providers do their best to estimate the average ratio between RAM, CPU, Database and File Storage. They then scale up all four variables at the same time.

Problem One: Every Instance is Different

Some people create a Mastodon server for a community of people who like art. In their case their media storage fills up far faster than a typical Mastodon instance with the images and videos. They end up having to pay for a powerful large Mastodon server when they only really needed extra storage.

Other people have PeerTube instances for streaming videos. They need a powerful server but not the large amount of storage that comes with it because they don't keep copies of the streams online.

Problem Two: People Have Multiple Instances

Some organizations and communities have a PeerTube, Mastodon and Pixelfed instance. They can set these each up on a different VPS or Managed hosting service.

In this situation they will often find themselves with spare storage on one instance, and no storage left over on another.

Using Shared Storage

These situations leave you paying for unused resources. FediHost has worked to solve this problem by letting users pay for storage that works across your instances.