pricing

Credit card payments are accepted, and other payment methods are available, depending on your location. In most countries, PayPal is also accepted.

To view a detailed list of accepted payment methods, please click here and choose your country.

Payments are processed by FastSpring.

It's also possible to pay using bank wire and some cryptocurrencies but only for payments of 3 months or more at a time. Please contact info@masto.host to subscribe using an alternative payment method.

Prices are tax-exclusive, meaning that tax will be charged on top of the listed prices.

The tax rate will be different for each country. In fact, some countries don't even charge sales tax or VAT.

Before subscribing to the service, you will be presented with the total and details for your location.

Masto.host uses FastSpring as a merchant of record. FastSpring will invoice and process taxes and payments.

Renewals are automatic unless a plan is cancelled.

You can cancel at any time, with no extra costs.

Related:

• How to upgrade, downgrade or cancel the service

You may upgrade or downgrade to a different plan at any time.

Upgrades and downgrades require a server reboot and entail around 30 seconds of downtime.

Related:

• How to upgrade, downgrade or cancel the service

The number of users on your Mastodon server is just one factor influencing the resources needed.

Every time you or a user on your server follows or is followed by a remote user, that will have an impact. This depends on multiple factors, from the popularity of that remote user to how active they are.

So, if you want to keep your usage low, users should not engage in mass following of remote users and avoid using federation relays as much as possible.

All plans will use the latest stable release of Mastodon.

Custom Mastodon forks, other Activity Pub software and code changes are not supported.

Mastodon provides a Custom CSS option in the administration interface, which you can use for basic customization of the web interface.

Please view the Administration help section for server configuration options changes you can request.

You should read the Terms of Service, where you will find more details about the service.

Also, you should note that communities focused on illegal activities or becoming a gathering for users promoting the following topics will be asked to migrate to a different hosting solution:

• Sexual content involving minors, including artistic depictions
• Gore and extremely graphic violence, including artistic depictions
• National Socialism
• Nazism
• Holocaust denial
• Racism
• Alt-right, including under the disguise of freedom of speech
• Gender-critical
• Sex and gender discrimination
• Transphobia
• Misogyny
• Pro-ana / Pro-mia

When subscribing to one of the plans, you agree to comply with the Terms of Service.

The database disk space limit is not a hard limit. If you go over the limit for a few days, your server will not be suspended or somehow throttled.

If you exceed the limit, you will be contacted and asked to upgrade your plan, and if there is no response, the upgrade will happen automatically at the next billing cycle.

You can set a Content cache retention period to reduce your database size.

The number of registered users on your server is not limited.

There is also no limit on the number of active users.

The active number of users displayed in pricing is just provided to give a rough estimate based on the average usage seen across other Mastodon servers.

You can check the number of active users in your Mastodon server by going to Preferences->Administration->Dashboard under 'Active Users'.

The Federation Capacity levels (low, moderate, medium, high, very high) are provided to help guide you on how much the Processing Threads limit the Federation.

To provide a rough idea of how Mastodon federates, you can think of it as:

• Every time you favourite, boost or reply to a post, that information needs to be federated, so the account that made the original post knows of your interaction;
• Every time you post, that post needs to federate so that the users following you can see it on their timelines/server;
• Every time someone you follow posts or interacts with your posts, that also needs to federate for you to see that post/interaction.

Be aware that it's more complex than this, and you also need to factor in that if you have multiple users on your server, this applies to every user.

Generally, the more remote users are followed by someone on your server, the more popular users become the more Federation Capacity you will need.

The Processing Threads limit is the sum of threads available for federation jobs plus the short-lived HTTP requests made to your Mastodon server.

Example: If your plan has a limit of 4 Processing Threads. Your server can only perform 2 concurrent federation jobs and 2 concurrent short-lived HTTP requests simultaneously.

When all the Processing Threads are occupied, new requests will be queued.

Using the previous example, where a limit of 2 concurrent short-lived HTTP requests is in place if 3 people attempt to request a page load the web interface at the same microsecond, 2 will immediately be processed. The third will need to wait (in this case, it should take microseconds).

The media storage limit is not a hard limit. If you exceed the limit for a few days, your server will not be suspended or stopped from uploading media.

If you exceed the limit, you will be contacted and asked to upgrade your plan, and if there is no response, the upgrade will happen automatically at the next billing cycle.

Masto.host has in place an automatic remote cache deletion. Please read for details.

Media storage prices cover no more than 2 GB of monthly download transfers per GB of storage.

There is a regular automated remote cache deletion to keep your Mastodon server storage space usage (both database and media) as low as possible.

Currently, that is applied to remote media attachments, preview cards and avatars/headers. This may change as Mastodon introduces more hosting sustainability tools and new features.

Please read for details.

Backups

Masto.host runs daily remote backups of the data in your server (remote cache is not backed up).

Read Downloading Backups for details.

Migrating your server

You can migrate in and out of Masto.host whenever you like.

To migrate in read: Migrating server to Masto.host

To migrate out read: Migrating server from Masto.host