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.

Every plan comes with free email notifications from a custom @masto.host email address that is only used to send. The SMTP provider used is MailGun but you can change to use your own SMTP. Just email info@masto.host requesting the change.

Mastodon works over TLS and all plans come with a free certificated issued by Let's Encrypt.

At any time you can upgrade and downgrade a plan. In the case of a dedicated plan, this will cause some downtime because there will be a physical change in server. Shared hosting plan changes don't have any downtime when upgrading or downgrading.

The default payment method used is PayPal. If you prefer to use another payment method you will have to contact info@masto.host and the billing will need to be done at least quarterly.

You can use your own domain name (example.com) or your own subdomain (subdomain.example.com). If you don't have one or prefer to use a Masto.host subdomain (example.masto.host), you can do so by choosing the name to use and it comes included with no extra charge with every plan.

One of the things that makes Mastodon so great is that each community/instance is unique. The number of users that each instance can accommodate vary greatly. The up to number of users mentioned in the plans are merely indicative.

The limits in dedicated plans are the server resources. In a high volume instance it is impossible to give an exact number of expected users. If the instance was a low volume one, you could expect it to work with up to: 2.000 users in the Start plan, 5.000 users in the Medium plan and 10.000 users in the Large plan. These values are merely indicative and for an instance that allows high volume but is being used with low volume.

All plans are monthly and can be cancelled at any time. If a plan renewal is cancelled, the instance will be suspended and deleted in 24 hours. To cancel a plan just email info@masto.host

• 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.