Asklemmy

I already owned my own home server that I built for running a file server and other random things. Currently all I’m paying for is $2.50/month for a proxy server on Google Cloud so I don’t have to expose my stuff directly to the internet.

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.

Because I don't want to be reliant on someone else's servers, plus I can set it up exactly how I want.
As for how I pay for the server, I use a free OCI VPS, so... I don't. The domain does cost some $14 per year, but that's really easy to afford even as a student.

I host my own, and I already have servers for other reasons so there's effectively no extra cost because I can easily handle the load.

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

I host my own to act as the sister of my Mastodon instance. It's hard to afford given I'm a student, but it pays off knowing I'm on my little node of the decentralized internet.