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?
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.