Farewell to Guppe (fediverse server)
Farewell to Guppe (fediverse server)
"For the first year or so, it hummed along fine on a $5/month barebones hosting plan, so I didn’t mind paying for it to keep it going for those who found it useful. Then 2022 happened. After some growth early in the year, it needed an upgrade to the $20-$40/month range. Not pocket change, but it seemed to make people happy. In the fall, with the massive influx of people in the Fediverse, Guppe was being absolutely hammered. I spent dozens of unpaid hours refactoring it to a scalable infrastructure, optimizing the code, and upgrading plans to keep up with the demand. It finally settled with a setup that required 2 servers, 8 replicas of the Guppe server, and 25 replicas of the delivery process – to the tune of $200/month. That was a cost I could not ignore."