Asklemmy

I host my own to act as the sister of my Mastodon instance. It's hard to afford given I'm a student, but it pays off knowing I'm on my little node of the decentralized internet.

I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning

The "why" for me is "Why not?" - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy's backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.

As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of "keeping up to date" with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.

It's cheap enough that I can pay for it, and I feel like it's a valuable service to provide.

Hosting my own instance on my server just because I can. And I have resources.

If your ISP can give you publicly routed IP address - you can host it too, right from your home!

It’s WAY faster than sharing an instance with normies. Think of it as your own personal caching server.

As for payment, you sign up to a VPS provider and give them your credit card, and pay for the usage.