Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...


If you're reading this, you're talking to icculus.org's new server, located now in Germany in one of Hetzner's datacenters.

I didn't have much beef with Digital Ocean, our previous provider. Their tools were fine, they basically worked. But we were running out of RAM (8 gigabytes should be enough for anyone, right?!) all the time, and once we ran out of RAM, it was disaster: services would fail, systemd would hang up, things like rebooting the server cleanly were out of the question, so we'd have to cycle the power through Digital Ocean's web interface...not great.

We trimmed things where we could, but ultimately the solution was always going to be to just stick more memory in the machine. And this was...not cheap on Digital Ocean. It quickly moves from a nice place to easily get a Linux box on the internet at hobbyist prices to something priced for companies that make money and can throw it at a better machine.

Hetzner, on the other hand, will give you a pretty beefy (bare metal, not virtualized) server for almost pennies. We ended up with six physical CPU cores and 128 gigabytes of RAM, two terabytes of NVMe disks (which are now mirrored in a ZFS pool), and unlimited bandwidth to a gigabit connection. 45 bucks a month. It's much much more hardware at a third of the price. I got it through their server auction site, which offers massive, droolworthy kit for dirt cheap.

Since it was dirt cheap, I've also moved libsdl.org and discourse.libsdl.org from Digital Ocean to another Hetzner server. Not Germany this time, but Finland. We're just having a whole European tour, I swear.

Also, in the current political climate, I wasn't sad to move all this data off of American soil. But I am sad that I wasn't sad. But that's where we are at the moment.

Anyhow, if something looks broken, it probably is broken, so don't be afraid to let me know, and I'll get it fixed up!

--ryan.



When this .plan was written: 2025-08-17 00:06:33
.plan archives for this user are here (RSS here).
Powered by IcculusFinger v2.1.27
Stick it in the camel and go.