Hosting Providers

Options for running a Fediverse server, from fully managed to self-hosted. Prices change often — the figures below are what each provider's site showed on 2026-10-15.

Managed Fediverse Hosting

Provider	Platforms	Starting price	Notes
Masto.host	Mastodon	$6/month + tax (pricing)	Fully managed: install, upgrades, security
Fedihost	Mastodon, PeerTube, GoToSocial	$4/month	Backups included; data portable

Other providers come and go; check that a provider currently lists your platform before relying on it.

Self-Hosting

Requirements

Each project documents its own requirements — use these rather than generic tables:

Platform	Requirements
GoToSocial	~250–350 MB RAM in use for a small instance; ~1 GB system RAM recommended (docs)
Mastodon	PostgreSQL, Redis, Ruby, Node.js, plus object storage for media at scale (docs)
Pixelfed	PHP, MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL, Redis, ffmpeg (docs)
PeerTube	Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, ffmpeg; video storage dominates (docs)

Any mainstream VPS or container host can run these; media and video storage usually costs more than compute.

Quick Start with GoToSocial

The lightest option for a personal server (see the installation guide for the config file you need first):

# Latest releases: https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases
wget https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/download/v0.22.2/gotosocial_0.22.2_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf gotosocial_0.22.2_linux_amd64.tar.gz
./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml server start

Docker Compose

Most platforms ship a Compose file. Mastodon's docker-compose.yml (v4.7.3) uses:

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:14-alpine
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
  web:
    image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:v4.7.3   # pin a specific version
  streaming:
    image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon-streaming:v4.7.3
  sidekiq:
    image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:v4.7.3

Managed vs Self-Hosted

Aspect	Managed	Self-Hosted
Setup	Minutes	Hours
Upgrades and security fixes	Provider	You
Control and customisation	Limited	Full
Backups	Usually included	Your responsibility

Managed hosting suits first-time admins and small communities. Self-hosting suits people who want full control or custom modifications — and who will apply security releases promptly.

Object Storage

Large instances store media in S3-compatible object storage (e.g. AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, or self-hosted MinIO). Compare current storage and egress pricing directly; egress is often the larger cost for media-heavy servers.

See Also

• Server Software Overview
• GoToSocial (lightweight option)
• Mastodon