I’ve been having a lot of lag on lemmy.world lately, moreso during certain times of the day. I’m not sure if this is because of geographic location or just burden on the server.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list shows a list of all servers and their uptime but does not give how long a server has been online. Uptime is a somewhat unreliable measure of reliability because they might have only been online for a day.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map gives the closest server but most local servers have only 1-4 users and there is no way to gauge whether those servers are reliable or trustworthy.
Is there a tool to find the closest server with a reliable uptime over a period of months with at least >100 users?
You can always self host
https://blog.colic.io/2023/07/07/self-hosting-lemmy-a-step-by-step-guide-with-docker-compose/
long term I’d like to, but it requires some investment in dedicated hardware, and I’m guessing getting a domain is not free typically either. How much does it cost to setup and operate a basic server month to month?
You can get a raspberry pi 4 or greater to run Lemmy and use this site to calculate the power cost
If I ran one at home power would be €8 a year to run the pi 24/7 with a fan. Then however much you pay a year for a domain.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world will have a tonne more resources for hosting your instance plus how to secure it.
You can use a small VPS for a low traffic instance. $5/month would get you started. Domain is around $10/year depending.