Not sure how relevant will this be to your question but the admin of the instance I’m on is quite transparent with the server performance etc. and perhaps it’ll provide some insight. Also quite interesting was the fact that storage itself is cheap but the bandwidth fees are not (from the comments).
I still haven’t figured out how to correctly link to posts on other instances so I’m pasting a direct link hoping a friendly bot finds it and updates it: lemmy.zip/post/509553
photonic_sorcerer