A question on hosting a Matrix server on a cheap VPS

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨halva@discuss.tchncs.de⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hiya.

Because a certain country I’m a citizen of likes messing with international traffic, I’ve been increasingly aware of the fact web services can break here overnight. One of the things I’ve still yet to move somewhere more local (or at least have a reasonable backup plan) is messaging.

Matrix seems to be a decent enough replacement for Discord and Telegram in case things go south, but I’m a total brokie. What would be the be the least resource intensive server to put on a VPS in case I’ll need to do it, and would I lose out much in features (say, multiuser voice chats) if I were to use that least resource intensive server?

Cheers.

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smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Do not enter very large rooms (especially Matrix HQ!) and you’ll be fine.

I know it sounds extreme, but you may want to ban Matrix HQ from the start and just infrom anyone wanting to join your instance if they are ok with that. This room alone is a spam anyway and it took >100GB of space on my database, cleaning wasn’t simple.

Write me a message if you want any help 😊.

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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Depending on your use of Matrix you will run into memory and disk spaces issue pretty soon. Basically if you plan to participate in large public Matrix rooms it will not work on a cheap VPS because of that. However if you mainly use it for private messaging between friends etc. it will likely work.

That said, personally I think XMPP is better for that use-case as the mobile apps are easier to use and use less battery. The easiest way to set up a personal XMPP server for friends and family is snikket.org XMPP servers are super resource efficient, so even the cheapest VPS will not have any problems with it.

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- ssdfsdf3488sd@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just came here to say this, it workson a 10 dollar a year racknerd vps for me no problem. Matrix chugs on my much bigger vps, although it is sharing that with a bunch of other things, overall it should have mich more resources.
  
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- Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  has xmpp figured out carbons yet between multiple clients? also are there any good mobile clients?
  
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  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes to both. Check out joinjabber.org
    
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- rambos@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Im looking for simmilar thing as OP, a private chat server for 3-5 users. Your post seems super usefull.
  
  I’ve checked snikkets docker-compose and there are proxy and certs containers included. Can I use existing NPM reverse proxy with that docker-compose do you know? Asking before I start modifying docker-compose on my own trial and error approach
  
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  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hmm, maybe it is possible, but Snikket is quite opinionated and you need to keep in mind that the XMPP server also needs direct access to the TLS certificate as it isn’t only using port 443.
    
    Maybe it will be better to just use Prosody (or Ejabberd) instead then.
    
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excitingburp@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Probably less resource intensive: conduit.rs.

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Im_old@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I host mine (for two users + WhatsApp bridge) on a 4gb 1vcpu vm. When I was using a smaller vm with only 2gb of ram it would hang frequently due to memory exhausting and swapping. I’m using a debian image, and the different components of matrix are containers.

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Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Mine’s running on a VM with 2c/4t 2GB of RAM it shares with my Lemmy instance and it’s been working fine. I’m running Synapse, there’s more lightweight alternatives as well.

The Matrix servers don’t do all that much, it’s pretty much just plumbing data streams and storing data. You need enough disk to store all the messages and reactions and enough bandwidth to sync the rooms, and that’s about it. Most of the encryption is client-side for proper E2EE, so it just moves data around.

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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I would be very hesitant to switch to Matrix as I’ve had some bad experiences with it and it is prone to memory leaks.

If you are really that concerned you could switch to Briar. Briar is totally decentralized so it is very hard to censor. The downside is that you may not receive messages if your offline. You can get around this with briar mailboxes on a old phone.

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption

TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL

VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #499 for this sub, first seen 9th Feb 2024, 11:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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Fewer Letters	More Letters
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)