Sunny Garden Hub

The Sunny Gardener - February 2026

A dynamic illustration starring the Tabaxi (Catkin/Catfolk) rogue, Pan, as he narrowly escapes a nighttime act of burglary by jumping through a second story window! Shards of glass and various treasures and trinkets whiz past Pan as he barrels out the window, daggers in claws, a red jeweled necklace in his mouth. However, this literal cat burglar isn’t at all worried or concerned— a look of mischief shines in his feline eyes as he makes his daring escape. With his tattered and patched green cloak, (including adorable little covers for his pointed ears!) the rest of the night belongs to Pan as he disappears anonymously into the silhouetted city below. – PAN RETURNS! by @mattievictoria

Mastodon Updates

There were a couple of small Mastodon updates this month, v4.5.6 and v4.5.7, with mostly minor behind the scenes fixes.

Hosting Price Increases

Due to the current AI/LLM hype boom and associated datacenter construction, the cost of hardware components has been increasing dramatically. Even consumer RAM costs 4-5x more than it did a few months ago, and companies even leaving the consumer market entirely in favour of the more profitable datacenter market.

As a result, multiple major hosting companies have recently announced price increases. So far, the impact on sunny.garden appears to be minimal.

Hetzner, which is being used for backups, is increasing their base monthly price from € 4.99 to € 6.49.

Our primary provider OVH, has not yet announced any increases on the dedicated server we use, which is the bulk of our expenses, or on S3 object storage which we use for media storage. They have announced a base price increase on the VPS used for the worker server, from CA$8.59 to CA$9.14 a month.

Overall, it looks like we can expect an increase of at least $3-4 in the coming months.

I had been planning to upgrade the dedicated server this summer, to increase our bandwidth and storage available for the database while also decreasing the monthly costs. This was due to the changes in pricing and server plans available since the contract on the current server was purchased. I’ll be monitoring the available server configurations and pricing in the meantime, to see what makes the most sense.

Spam and Scam

There was quite a bit of spam and scam activity recently. As always, be vigilant of anyone offering you money for anything out of the blue in any context, or claiming to be from “Mastodon Support” or things along those lines, and report suspicious messages.

Every Mastodon or fediverse server is operated independently, and there is no centralized “Mastodon Support” for you to engage with. The admins and mods for sunny.garden are listed on the About page for the server, and these are the only people you should deal with for any issues related to your account.

Summary

69 new users, 652 active users, 83k interactions, 90 reports opened, 90 reports resolved

Hosting Costs

Cost spreadsheet, text follows.

Expand Hosting Costs
sunny.garden February 2026
Main Server 12-32GB-512GB -$90
Worker Server 2-2GB-40GB -$7
Media Storage 286 GB -$13
Media Bandwidth Free $0
Backups 691 GB -$17
Domain Name $55/yr -$5
Email Server -$5
Donations One-Time $70
Donations Recurring $72
Monthly Totals
Previous Balance $75
Total Expenses -$136
Total Donations $142
Balance $81

Canadian Dollars

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook