@benjojo I didn't realize Hetzner was *this* popular. Though I'm pretty happy with them and usually recommend them when people need a VPS

@karpour @benjojo There is a bias here for open source nerds who want the cheapest stuff that's still good quality. If fedi was corporate, we'd see far more Azure/AWS/Google Cloud probably

@benjojo Been wondering the same, thanks for researching this! :)

@benjojo Great post, do love some stats.

One question, you mention: “While I believe that Hetzner and OVH is a better pick than say, Amazon/Azure/Oracle/Google”

Is there a particular reason why?

@benjojo that figures, I guessed it might be from the perspective of avoiding further centralisation. Thanks for confirming 🙂

@benjojo There is also some concentration for the #DNS authoritative servers : https://www.bortzmeyer.org/nameservers-fediverse.html

@bortzmeyer @benjojo I would wager that fewer rely on S3 than you'd expect, and even fewer when you account for user counts. A lot of these providers have their own S3 workalikes that are easy enough to set up, or folks can use R2, B2, or Wasabi. My guess is no single cloud storage provider has 51% like Hetz er does of compute.

@benjojo Is Hertzner empowering https://masto.host/ and that is why so many?

@benjojo Hmmm. Then I wonder why Hetzner hosts so much of the Fediverse even when you remove Mastodon.social -- do they do managed hosting of their own for Mastodon?

@tchambers@indieweb.social @benjojo@benjojo.co.uk they're cheap, good and European. what's not to like?

@tchambers @benjojo They don't, but a number of other large instances use them. There's another instance run my Mastodon "corporate" that's of course gonna be on Hetzner, and e.g. infosec.exchange uses them.

@benjojo What a wonderful investigation. Thanks, Ben.

@benjojo This was an awesome post! I loved that over 30% of instances behind Cloudflare are self-hosted at home.

Mindly.Social does fit into that larger percentage of users hosted at Hetzner, but that changes tomorrow once I migrate to our new host so the timing of this article is great because I'm glad to see I'm reducing the number of users hosted on a single host. 🤓

@KuJoe @benjojo Where are ya headed?

@ian @benjojo I've got my own hardware colocated in a local data center. I have a cabinet I share with my company so the costs are much much lower.

@benjojo One potentially useful edit: pointing out "Constant" is basically exclusively Vultr (there are other brands but folks are realistically gonna use Vultr, as it's DO-ish).

Also curious where folks with dedicated media hosts are putting their stuff. Guessing Bunny shows up a lot there (I know we are far from the only ones).

@benjojo It’s more resilient to disasters than other platforms, like Twitter. Especially because if Musk thinks he can help eg Putin, he’ll spread disinformation. Or, like he did with Starlink, he’ll turn the damn thing off.

@benjojo Thank you for gathering and sharing this information.

Love what you did to bypass the Proxies and "Getting servers to talk to you" 😂 well done!

@benjojo Great article! I'm surprised the big 3 (AWS, GCP, Azure) are so low on the list, I know that the Fediverse is overall against big tech but I still expected to see more of it.

@benjojo great work!

One thing I am quite surprised by: on the Fediverse backend hosting providers by active users chart, Hringdu ehf. gets 1.4%, translating to over 40k active users.

Thing is, Hringdu ehf. is a consumer ISP. I do not believe Hringdu offers any hosting services, nor any Internet services to actual datacenters.

That's super weird!

@benjojo that's fascinating, thanks!

@benjojo I'm surprised by so many home ISP users putting stuff behind cloudflare; is that their ISP doing that or are they doing that themselves?

@vidister @benjojo secret santa but it's blog posts