How does a hosting service work? Do you buy a domain from them or do you buy the domain separately?

I'm not familiar with GTS hosting specifically but normally you can buy your domain elsewhere and then create a DNS record to point your domain (or a subdomain) to the hosting provider or tell your domain to use their nameservers and they manage the records. Some will also offer you a subdomain of theirs (eg mastohost could give you lydia.masto.host) but normally on fedi a fun domain name is quite important to people 😅

Ah yes! You know, that's what I did for my Ghost blog. idk I just do these things then forget how it all works.

Is masto.host good? It looks like something a simpleton like me could handle. I guess it's a bit more expensive than if you do it all yourself -- which I don't think I could do.

I remember when I first came to Mastodon some people had some criticisms for the hosting services. Can't remember what though.

@mrbitterness

masto.host is great for me and doesn't need much technical know-how. My server runs on the cheapest tier ($6/mth) but you've a lot more followers so that might not be work for you.

There have been a few articles warning against the perils of running your own instance but it depends what you're after. I see you're on a small server already so you might familiar with overcoming some of them already. The connections from your 1K followers might help with that too

So my follower count adds to a data drain and cost more money?

Oolp!

The more accounts you follow or that follow you, the more posts there are to be federated between servers. The masto.host pricing tiers include "number of processing threads" and the more federation you have, the more processing threads you need