In reply to Howard Chu @ Symas.

Think it's more the amount. There's more to this than just pushing the note. Federated servers also check version and actor and some other things before pre-fetching images and content. This is quickly enough to saturate a small server on a land-line on 2nd hand hardware ;-)

Didn't have this sort of trouble when hosting in a data centre but this is simply too expensive nowadays and really enough for the "regular" visitors.