like many others, I hosted my own for a variety of reasons.

• I like to tinker
• this was a chance to do a lot of tinkering and get in on the "ground-floor" of something I think has a lot of potential
• it gives me a bit more control over the experience, which is helpful when trying to get friends/family to give Lemmy a chance.

As for the cost, I have several VPS's which cost ~$40/year, so the cost is basically negligible.

I'm selfhosting my instance for fun and not for profit. I'm using a server on Hetzner that costs me 4.11/mo. I'm the only active user of my instance, but I like to own my own data and selfhost my own services.

To have some control over my data and for the fun of it. With money? Selfhosting to me is a hobby and it has also taught me a lot, some of which has been helpful on my career.

I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.

I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning

I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.

I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I've been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.

The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.

Highly recommend more smaller instances.

My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).

**Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **

I want my own space in the internet and I set aside money for it monthly from my paychecks

I am already hosting the AI Horde so I'm good with infrastructure. And since lemmy provided an ansible playbook which is my expertise, I thought it would be easy. And it was, even with my using my own loadbalancer solution instead of nginx.

I already had a server I wasn't using much for the AI Horde so I repurposed it. The DB physical I have is really good so I just made it share the DB for lemmy as well.

I pay for it from the same budget which runs on donations. I put a Kofi link on the sidebar and already covered so much of the costs that I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development