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18-03-2021
You may be thinking about hosting your own Gemini capsule in the cloud but you don't know where to start or the exact resources needed. With some technical knowledge, hosting your own Gemini capsule on a cloud based Virtual Private Server (VPS) should not be too difficult or costly. This capsule uses the Agate server, written in Rust.
There are some great guides out there on hosting your own Gemini capsule. Chris Were UK has a great guide and Youtube video. All you need is some familiarity with the command line and the Linux shell. Some of you may be wondering what resources are needed, in terms of memory, bandwidth and storage space. From my experience, a Gemini capsule requires few resources.
This capsule uses 1.8GB of bandwidth. Granted, it's a new capsule and I'm not getting any traffic but the number is miniscule. It uses 187MB of memory, and is using 1GB of storage space. The VPS server I'm using has the following allowances: 256GB bandwidth, 256MB memory and 10GB storage. So as you can see, only small resources are needed and the capsule is future proofed.
Companies such as Digital Ocean offer some very good packages for VPS servers but at $5 a month for the base option, or $60 a year, they are just overkill and too expensive when all you want is to host a simple Gemini capsule.
The company I use for server hosting, Hostnamaste, offers a very competitive package that works out at approximately $15 a year for the VPS package that I listed above. They have servers worldwide. If you are interested in checking them out, I would ask you to please use my affiliate link below: Every little helps :)
Hostnamaste run an efficient service, and their customer service is prompt and helpful. If you decide to use their service, for registration they will require a hostname. Any name will do here for now, you can change it later. For the DNS server boxes, " NS1" and "NS2" will suffice. Enjoy building your new capsule!