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.
I think a bookwyrm community would be fitting! I’m pretty sure they have a migration feature too. I can actually try and experiment and see how intensive it is on our resources and see if I can run it on this server…