I’ve seen other instances do this, so I figured I might as well too. Right now the instance is hosted on a relatively medium sized VPS with object storage. Lemmy uses very little resources, so I run some personal stuff on the server as well (like a screenshot hoster, blog, etc) but if I need to upgrade I can eventually.
VPS: $13.99
Object storage: as of right now it is $2.20 (and growing, slowly but surely)
I’m not opposed to donations, but it’s not required. The biggest cost is likely going to be object storage more and more.
The storage size is wild though
Yeah that’s pretty crazy lol, especially since your instance isn’t huge yet. I know what lemm.ee did was cap their upload size to 100kb or something, so it’s just large enough to handle things like profile pictures, but not big enough to actually host images. The point is to encourage their users to upload to other services like imgur so they don’t have to deal with it.