You can get a decent VPS (Hetzner is well-liked) for ~$8 USD. Using an S3 bucket for media storage starts at a few cents per month and will grow from there based on how you set up media retention, but it’ll take a while for that to be a real cost. Plus whatever your domain costs (~$1-2/mo is pretty standard).
So all in probably about $10/mo.
That’s more than enough for a small instance, probably enough for a medium-sized instance too. Admins of the big instances probably have more info about what happens when you get huge.
Of course you could run it all on your own equipment at home for “free” too.
You can get a decent VPS (Hetzner is well-liked) for ~$8 USD. Using an S3 bucket for media storage starts at a few cents per month and will grow from there based on how you set up media retention, but it’ll take a while for that to be a real cost. Plus whatever your domain costs (~$1-2/mo is pretty standard).
So all in probably about $10/mo.
That’s more than enough for a small instance, probably enough for a medium-sized instance too. Admins of the big instances probably have more info about what happens when you get huge.
Of course you could run it all on your own equipment at home for “free” too.