A server is just a computer. We run our own Mastodon instance, the server for it is literally an old desktop sitting under our desk! (It was running on our gaming desktop until we bought an old small office PC for dedicated servering and moved our stuff over to that.)
It does have a hard drive, and it can in theory fill up, but like, text is TINY. Really tiny. and hard drives are big. You aren’t gonna fill anything up by posting a ton.
Pictures and especially video take up a LOT more space. On our Mastodon, 99% of the space is the remote media cache, which can be cleared out without issue (because the other server it came from still has a copy of it, in theory), and it has a procedure for clearing that out. The actual stuff we’ve uploaded ourselves doesn’t take up nearly as much space (but it’s a server just for us, if we had a lot of random people on it we’d probably need way more disk space).
Things get significantly more expensive if your server is a VM in “the cloud” (someone else’s computer in a datacenter). They charge monthly for that, and usually don’t give you much storage (we have a small VPS mostly as a bounce point but our email is also there, and it has a 20GB disk, compared to the 500GB disk that’s in our physical server machine). You can buy extra storage but they charge monthly for that, too.
But all that is stuff for the instance admins to worry about. If they need more infrastructure costs they can always ask for donations or something.
– Frost
A “server” is just any computer serving up digital services through a network. It can be anything from a tiny IoT device (Raspberry Pis are/were popular amongst hobbyists) to a huge expensive specialized computer sitting in a data center rack, or really all the way to super custom hardware. The “what” is way less important than the “why”.
It’s all about what the server is doing. Usually, the “service” is HTTP traffic (the web/internet/etc), but it can be anything.
It works exactly like any other computer, but of course after decades and decades of development, there is a huge variety of specialized hardware made for ‘serving’ up … all sorts of services. Specialized web servers, specialized database servers, specialized storage servers, specialized “AI” servers, etc etc etc. Many modern day services use several of these specialized devices together to provide services that can handle millions+ of users. While tying all those specialized devices together can get really complex, they’re still just computers that are really good at specific things.
The only thing that truly defines a ‘server’ as far as hardware is concerned is how specialized/optimized the hardware is for serving up those services.
A server is a computer that’s configured to efficiently take network requests, process them, and send network responses. You can use any general purpose computer as a server, but custom built computers will likely be more efficient.
Servers can be self-hosted, co-located by high speed internet connections, or part of server “farms” where a lot of computers and hard drives are stored in dedicated racks where a physical hard drive failure means they pull out that drive and pop in a new one, with no loss of data because the data is written to multiple disks.
FWIW, they can definitely fill up. If you can afford it definitely donate and the team will use it to run the platform and pay the devs!
A server is just a computer like any other that connects to other computers through the internet and shares data back and forth. It stores its info in hard drives so yes, they can definitely fill up. But just like other computers they can be upgraded with more storage space if that happens.
The cost ranges wildly depending on how powerful a server you need. I’ve used my 10+ year old lenovo as a server and it probably isn’t worth much. Conversely, I’m sure some professional server stacks can get quite costly.
As for if lemmy.world needs more, I can’t say. That would be up to the maintainers of that instance to comment on.
To narrow it a down a bit more, the client (like your web browser) is asking another computer to do stuff for it. The program on the remote computer that listens and does stuff is the server (like Apache, IIS, or nginx).
Just like restaurant servers and customers are both human; they just have different roles.
How high is up?
