I've been playing around using masto.host to run my own instance. It's fully provisioned, and takes care of all the upgrades. The cheapest plan is 6 bucks a month, which isn't really that crazy. I was already pitching in a couple of bucks for the instance I was using, so it wasn't really a big difference in terms of cost.
I've run it for a week so far without any problems, and it seems to be working as well as the instance I was using before. Big advantage is that I have full control over which servers and accounts I federate with.
The one thing I didn't realize is how much data mastodon servers go through. My instance chewed through the 20 gig limit in just a couple of days initially. Then I set media retention policy to a day and now it peaks at around 15 gigs.
I'd be curious to hear if anybody else decided to run their own instance and their experience with that. Are there any downsides that are not obvious here?
I just moved my Mastodon server from masto.host to being self hosted on a Raspberry Pi because of the server costs (which increase automatically on masto.host if you exceed the plan limits).
I guess I'm still within the limit for now, that's the main thing I want to keep an eye on for a few weeks to see that my data usage is stable. Seems like setting a hard limit on media retention is key. I don't really want to have to do admin work maintaining my own instance, hence why I'd rather just pay a few bucks a month for somebody else to do it.