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Offshore Hosting for a Mastodon Instance
You want to run a Mastodon instance for your community - regional, language-based, or interest-based - on infrastructure outside the typical US-cloud-and-CDN axis. Reasons: data sovereignty, no advertiser harvesting, jurisdiction outside the most common takedown channels, and the practical fact that big cloud providers periodically suspend Mastodon instances for moderation disagreements. This page describes hosting Mastodon on an Anubiz VPS.
Need this done for your project?
We implement, you ship. Async, documented, done in days.
Mastodon stack reality
Mastodon is heavier than people expect. Rails app, Sidekiq workers, Postgres, Redis, and an Elasticsearch optional. Local media storage grows fast - federation fetches media from across the fediverse. For an instance with 100 active users, 4 vCPU 8 GB RAM and 160 GB NVMe is a reasonable starting point. Beyond 500 active users, expect to move to 8 vCPU 16 GB RAM and consider object storage for media.
Install path
Two main options: the official Mastodon install script (single-server setup on Ubuntu LTS) or Docker Compose. Both are documented in the Mastodon docs. Plan for: Postgres tuning, Sidekiq concurrency tuning, Nginx tuning, a CDN or local cache for static assets, and Elasticsearch only if your community will use full-text search. Federation requires reliable outbound network; choose an Anubiz location with stable upstream peering.
Anubiz binding
Anubiz offshore VPS plans from $17.90/mo; Mastodon-suitable plans (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, NVMe) from $39.90/mo. Iceland, Romania, Netherlands are all good options - Iceland for political resilience, Romania for cost, Netherlands for fediverse performance to European peers. Crypto payment, no KYC. Internal links: /en/hosting-for-pleroma-instance-offshore, /en/hosting-for-misskey-instance-offshore, /en/hosting-for-matrix-homeserver-offshore.
What Anubiz does not handle
Anubiz does not operate your Mastodon instance. We do not moderate your users. We do not apply federation suspensions. We do not manage your Sidekiq queue. We do not pre-install Mastodon. We provide the VPS with root access. Mastodon operation - install, moderation, federation policy, abuse handling - is yours.
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Why Anubiz Host
100% async — no calls, no meetings
Delivered in days, not weeks
Full documentation included
Production-grade from day one
Security-first approach
Post-delivery support included
Ready to get started?
Skip the research. Tell us what you need, and we'll scope it, implement it, and hand it back — fully documented and production-ready.