Shared hosting plans are all low volume and dedicated plans are all high volume. In a low volume plan there is a limit in the amount of data per minute that each instance can process, in a high volume the limit is the resources of the server.

The low volume limits for shared hosting plans are:

5 posts/minute - Personal
10 posts/minute - Niche
15 posts/minute - Party
20 posts/minute - Disco

Usually, a good way to see if you are over the limit is to look at your Federated Timeline. For example, if you are in a Personal Plan and open the Federated Timeline, look at the last 5 minutes and see how many posts are listed. For this example if it's over 25 posts, then you are over the limit.

This is not a hard limit and it can randomly occur without a problem but if your instance is constantly in high volume, you will be asked to upgrade or move to another service.

• The initial setup of the dedicated server can take up to 24 hours.
• dedicated plans don't have any backups included, it's up to you to setup the backups of that server/VPS
• the access to the dedicated server/VPS is done via SSH public key (there is no root login, you can upgrade your privileges to root but only via command line), you need to create a combo of public/private SSH keys and send the public via email
• if you want to do changes to Mastodon code, you need to setup your own Mastodon fork and keep it online (ideally on GitHub) before the installation so I can use it as the source for the code. No code should be changed directly on the server because during upgrades it will be overwritten. Also, you should test the changes in a test environment before requesting to put them live, there will be no coding support and if something breaks and makes the instance unusable due to the code, you will have to deal with it. The dedicated plans with a custom fork can only request two upgrades a month and that should be done via email.