Managed Mastodon instances entering preview mode

Communick first started with the idea to provide the easiest and cheapest way for people to participate in the fediverse. Given our focus on privacy and based on the principle that we would never “monetize” our customers, we put our efforts on providing a service that could work for everyone, but we did not want to make any type of features for any type of specific market segments.

In some ways, that was successful. We have been running our servers for close to 3 years now without any major incident. We set up our infrastructure in a way that could (potentially) serve tens of thousands of customers very efficiently. Almost all of the processes were automated to the point where I could go for months without touching any of the servers, except for the occasional upgrade for a new release. Even today, our cost per active user is so low that we can manage to offer access packages that cost less than $0.50/month per user and still be profitable.

But it seems that is not enough. The absolute majority of people coming to the fediverse are not doing it because they are looking for something super cheap or free. They are doing it because they want to feel like they have their own space, interact with the people they already have connected in other networks. They are willing to pay a lot more than a few cents per month, if they know the people behind the servers.

So, instead of arguing with everyone trying to convince them that a communick account could give them all the functionality they needed (at a lower price), I decided to offer them what they are demanding instead. Which brings us to our first step in this phase: we are offering now Mastodon instance hosting.

To have your own Mastodon server, all you need to do now is to purchase a domain. We will manage it, make sure things are up-to-date, secure, backed-up properly, etc. You get admin access right away and all you should worry about is in keeping your community vibrant and healthy.

At first we are offering one single configuration: a server that is provisioned with enough resources to handle ~100 users comfortably and efficiently. We are still figuring out the pricing and how to offer single-user instances, but they should come pretty soon. If you are also looking for someone that can host bigger instances, do keep in touch.

That’s it for now. I know this blog has been silent for a long time, but I’m planning to bring more updates here.