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I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.
Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.
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.
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.
I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.
The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.
I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.
Yep. I want to federate and block who I want to federate and block. Large instance admins need to make compromises for practical reasons, but I don't. My personal instance has no boards, so I don't have to deal with problematic users from other instances either. If an instance is particularly awful, I can just not visit them until I have time to switch to my admin account and defederate it, there's no urgency.
Plus, I thought it would be easier to get my friends to switch if they had an admin they could literally call if they ran into problems.
i wish us users could afford such luxury of blocking certain instances on our own.
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 already owned my own home server that I built for running a file server and other random things. Currently all Iβm paying for is $2.50/month for a proxy server on Google Cloud so I donβt have to expose my stuff directly to the internet.
The "why" for me is "Why not?" - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy's backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.
As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of "keeping up to date" with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.
It's cheap enough that I can pay for it, and I feel like it's a valuable service to provide.
Hosting my own instance on my server just because I can. And I have resources.
If your ISP can give you publicly routed IP address - you can host it too, right from your home!