Costs & Platforms

This doc assumes that we migrate to Matrix Synapse, like with the Fandoms experiment. We could go elsewhere. Alternatives include RocketChat, and other XMPP based platforms.

Saas/PaaS

Alpabet soup aside, maybe we don’t want to host our own instace after all. ETKE would likely be our first choice for a managed instance, and they offer a fully managed solution on their hardware, or installation and maintenance on our hardware.

Installation on their hardware with Hetzner costs $20USD a month, and includes backups, 2 vCPU cores, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD, and 2TB traffic recommended for rooms below 3000 users. This isn’t enough storage, and would likely require the addition of something like Backblaze B2 for additional cost (10/25). Things like Matrix RTC, configuring S3, and email setup cost extra per month! Ouch!

Installation on our hardware or VPS costs $5 a month, plus our VPS costs and whatever add-ons we pick (like RTC above) (10/25).

Doing it Ourself

Like with the Fandoms experiment, we can deploy our own instance using Ansible. For this, we would primarily use a VPS.

Most providers use 1 CPU core and 2GB of memory for their base instances of Synapse, so I’ve assumed those values for cost.

Providers

	OVH	DigitalOcean	Hetzner
Arch	x64	x64	x64
CPU	4	1	2
RAM	8G	2G	4G
Data	400Mpbs ALL	2kGB trans	20TB
Storage	75G	50G	40G
Price	$4.20	$12	€3.49
Term	1yr	None	None

Storage

Media must be stored outside of the VPS no matter if we get our own, or have ETKE manage it. Per our storage estimate, it would be unreasonable to store all media on the VPS. So, we’ll likely need to use Backblaze B2.

Thankfully, the cost appears to be less than a dollar per month for about 100GB. Dang, good storage sure is cheap. Download costs and API costs are unknown at this time, but probably low.

Other storage costs:

	OVH	BackBlaze
Cost per GB/mon	0.008	0.00075
API costs?	No	Yes
Download cost/GB	0.011	0.01
Own download free?	Yes	NA
Storage type	S3	S3/B2

B2 pricing is confusing, but probably cheaper.