January 15, 2025 - 1 min read

How Shared Storage Works

Shared storage is a helpful system used by FediHost to avoid "paying twice" when you create new services. Why? Often when you setup a VPS or use managed hosting you end up with left over capacity. Providers do their best to estimate the average ratio between RAM, CPU, Database and File Storage. Plans then scale up all four variables at the same time. But there are two issues with this approach. Not Every Instance is The Same Some people create a Mastodon server for a community of people w

By Paige Saunders

Shared storage is a helpful system used by FediHost to avoid "paying twice" when you create new services.

Why?

Often when you setup a VPS or use managed hosting you end up with left over capacity. Providers do their best to estimate the average ratio between RAM, CPU, Database and File Storage. Plans then scale up all four variables at the same time.

But there are two issues with this approach.

Not Every Instance is The Same

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 that the community generates and follows. 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 sever but not the large amount of storage that comes with it because they don't keep copies of the streams online.

These situations leave you paying for unused resources.

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.

Shared Storage

FediHost has worked to solve this problem by letting users pay for storage that works across your instances.

Every instance of a service by default adds 10GB to this pooled storage and you can then buy a pack of storage which is usable across instances.

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