Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
To clarify that comment - I handed lemmy.ca over to @smorks@lemmy.ca as I no longer have the time to run, maintain, and moderate it. The cost for me was negligible at this point - I had it sitting on a dedicated server that ran several other things.
What traffic did you get there ? Why dedicated, when most use VPS for lemmy ?
I already had the dedicated server, so it was easy enough to just virtualhost it.