Anyone run a matrix server in the cloud? How much does it cost you?
Toying with the idea of setting this up for myself, maybe a few bridges, maybe a few group chats on matrix itself. What kind of cost should I expect?
Matrix servers have the problem of highly variable resource use.
Basically if you only use it for some light chatting with friends and family and some niche topic public rooms it isn't very heavy.
But if any user of your homeserver joins any busy rooms or uses the bridges to join busy public Telegram channels or such, it will quickly outgrow the resources of a reasonably priced VPS.
Personally I would rather recommend you to set up an xmpp server, which can include a gateway to Matrix and other services, but architecturally is much more lightweight and has better mobile clients.
@zygohistomorpheus If you don’t mind being powered by Oracle, the free tier OCI is pretty generous
I pay 6.84€ a month for a VPS plus 4.65€ a year for the domain. That gets me a VPS with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM so in addition to Matrix, I can also fit a few Fediverse services, Nextcloud, a homepage, ...
For something like that, you'd want a VPS with 2-4 cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD. Any less and you'll start to run into problems when adding bridges and stuff.
So, it's really a matter of what deals you can find in that bracket, and if you care about the geographical region it's hosted in. Usually https://lowendtalk.com/ is a good place to start looking at options.