After a couple of years on someone else's instance, I am working on setting up a single-user instance for myself. I've been messing around with the server a bunch, and sometimes it crashes for reasons I have yet to identify. I boot it up, and everything is fine and still running.

Since this is a single-user instance, is this actually a problem? I'm the only one who will be using it, so I can start and stop the server at will when I want it. I'd prefer it was up more than not, but if it's down, I can just bring it back up.

Does this affect federation in any way? Will I miss something because it's not online? When it's up and I'm posting, are my posts immediately sent out? When it's down, will it fail to fetch anything, or will posts get picked up when I'm online?