How to self-host a Matrix homeserver

Synapse wants RAM sized by rooms and media, not by a vCPU label. Element-docs install, .well-known federation, Postgres, and the public-room limit.

长文正文为英文。页头、目录与结账已翻译。

What people actually host

Matrix: self-hosting is a federation protocol: homeservers exchange rooms with each other the way mail servers exchange mail. Synapse installation is the reference homeserver, and clients such as Element connect through your own domain. Families and small organizations run it so chat metadata — who talks to whom, when — lands in a database they administer instead of a consumer messenger's.

Size by rooms, not labels

RAM is the axis that matters, and rooms decide it: a household server with a dozen light rooms is comfortable on Warden — 6 vCPU, 16 GB DDR5 ECC, 240 GB NVMe at $19.00 list, $15.20 annual-eff — while federated rooms with active media storage grow past that quickly. Postgres lives on the same box at this scale; media repository and database both sit on local NVMe, where write bursts are absorbed instead of queued.

The install, compressed

DNS and federation

Federation is DNS plumbing before it is compute: the server name in your user IDs must resolve, .well-known files must point delegates correctly, and port 8448 must answer TLS with a certificate your domain actually owns. Get those three right and rooms join themselves; get one wrong and remote homeservers silently refuse the handshake. Unmetered ports mean federation traffic never meters — the ceiling is the port speed, not a quota.

Location and payment

One list price covers all twenty-one flags, with Iceland at +20% and Switzerland at +35% as the only published premiums — so the flag decision costs nothing but thought. Pay annual and the −20% term applies before coin conversion: USDT for a boring dollar figure, BTC or XMR for a quieter rail, from the same sixteen-coin page. Provisioning runs about a minute after the invoice credits.

Limits

Legal rooms only — the AUP reads the same for a homeserver as for any other service. Federation is public by default: rooms your server joins are visible to the remote servers in them unless you lock the setup down, and no payment method changes that. Encrypted rooms keep payload content private, but membership metadata still crosses the federations your server participates in.