Great writeup thank you. May I just say that tmyour original plan was both ambitious and a little insane. And even the current cost and infrastructure is bonkers IMHO.

I do hope you’re getting donations to help with the cost. Good luck.

My instance is on the other end of the spectrum: I pay $6/month for it on digitalocean. It has 1G of RAM. It crashes every now and then, likely because of the RAM and OOM killer. But it’s only for me and a few ntfy fans, so it’s quite different.

Excuse my ignorance, but where can I find details to this issueand does it affect only 0.18.1, or also 0.18.0?

Install Debian Stable on a SSD, most likely via debootstrap from the Ubuntu system

What an interesting way to install a new system. I’ve only ever done that for image building purposes. Why would you do that instead of just installing it from a flash drive?

Also: it sounds like you’re manually installing things. I would suggest Ansible or something similar, so that reinstalling isn’t so brittle and manual.

I asked the same question on r/selfhosted a few weeks ago, and I was downvoted just for asking the question.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/13elu4p/why_downvote_so_much/

You can join the Matrix or Discord, and nimbleghost can help you out, most likely.

It only works with 16.4 afaik.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing.