Question

Keeping costs low while learning Mastodon

I want to take a tutorial on open source Mastodon to learn how to use it to set up my own social media platform app. I found a basic starter that began with the purchase of a linode hosting account, installs Cloudron and Mastodon to proceed. I don’t know if both are required, but that path was more expensive than a basic Digital Ocean free account (as a starting point). Searching the DO Marketplace, I found droplets for both Cloudron and Mastodon. At that point I became a bit confused. Are both required? In DO they seem to require two separate plans at $6/mo each. At this point I’m not ready to deploy an app. I’m just trying to learn. Does anybody have any tips or suggestions on how I should approach this? I began learning development some years back and opened a GoDaddy hosting account. After a few years, I quit GoDaddy and opened a Bluehost account. I’ve been learning on that for another three years now, and I’m transitioning from WordPress to React. I’m not an expert. I’m modest enough to admit that. I did open an Amazon AWS and I’m still paying a couple of bucks a month for a small learning app I have in an S3 bucket. They’re not really very helpful and their documentation is mind boggling. Although I’ve learned a lot, AWS is still daunting.

Please, some direction?


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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December 13, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there @silvanetLobster,

You do not need to have two separate servers for Cloudron and Mastodon.

Cloudron is basically software that lets you run apps like WordPress, Mastodon and etc.

With that in mind you have two options:

  • Install Cloudron using the 1-Click option below and then on that same server, you can use the Cloudron tool to install Mastodon on the same server:

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/cloudron

  • Option two is to skip Cloudron altogether and just use the 1-Click option for Mastodon:

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon

In both cases, you need just one server, but it is just personal preference whether you want to use Cloudron to manage your Mastadon installation or have Mastadon installed independently on the server.

Hope that this helps. Best, Bobby

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