Migrating my Mastodon server to Masto.host
A week ago, I migrated my Mastodon server from a self-hosted DigitalOcean droplet to an instance provided by Masto.host. The process was straightforward, took less than an hour, and the support from Hugo at Masto.host was top-notch.
Running mikecoats.social on DigitalOcean cost $32 every month and meant I had do all of my own sysadmin-ing. I had to keep the Mastodon installation up to date and secure, manage all of its direct dependencies, and maintain the underlying operating system. At times, my hobby really felt like it was turning into a "job."
The most challenging part over the years was managing major upgrades of the Linux distribution. These upgrades often brought newer versions of Mastodon's dependencies, such as the Postgres database or the Ruby runtime. Coordinating simultaneous upgrades across all three layers of the stack was definitely not "fun."
Moving to Masto.host will reduce my cost to just $9 per month and has removed about 95% of the administrative tasks required to keep my single-user instance running. I no longer need to worry about the operating system, database, or programming language and libraries used under the hood.
I wasn't even on the latest version, but Hugo took care of the upgrade as part of the migration too. Now, the only administration I need to do is managing Mastodon itself.
The migration process itself was super simple.
First step is to send off an email to Masto.host to arrange a date and time to kick off the migration.
You'll need to give them access to your existing installation to perform the migration, so we agreed to install Hugo's public SSH key in my server's authorized_keys file.
On the day of the migration, I made the required DNS changes to point to the new server while Hugo copied all the data across.
The transfer really doesn't take very long. It'll run about as fast as your server can push the data out.
And that's all it took; a few emails a week in advance, a few emails on the day of the migration and less than an hour of downtime.
2025-06-17