User:ApeKattQuest, MonkeyPython/aprilsnarr

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Our servers are on the move again!

You might remember that a few years ago we moved all our servers from the US to Europe. Sadly, that has proven too costly* and prone to fires (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovh-fire-update-four-halls-sbg1-destroyed-well-all-sbg2/), so we have decided our servers will continue their travel east and move to India, where hosting them will be significantly cheaper and cooling can be provided by sun-covering swarms of locusts. Most of the non-slacking members of our dev team are based in India by now anyway, so it feels like the right place!

As part of our cost-cutting process, and since air travel is not environmentally friendly anyway, we sent our servers East by boat. Unluckily, that means they had to wait their turn for quite a while in the only traffic jam you can see from space (https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2021/03/Suez_Canal_traffic_jam_seen_from_space). Luckily that is starting to get resolved now, but it will still take quite a while for the servers to clear the traffic jam, reach their destination and then be located among the twenty thousand containers in the ship carrying them, especially with all other jammed ships arriving at the same time! We're hoping to be done with it all in a couple months though, after which you can hopefully expect a return to our usual (not-particularly-)fast service.

In the meantime, our whole infrastructure is being hosted on some old servers that our friends at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona donated to us. They claimed they were getting too old for use in a rigorous academic environment, that as we all know in Spain requires systems to work continuously for a few hours every weekday with only a short break for a midday nap. These donated servers are now running from our executive director's basement. Any issues you have noticed recently are solely caused by this (and have nothing to do at all with the skill and attention span of our development team).

  • It could be argued that we should be able to cover the costs given we have had several years of good financial stability by now. While that is true, when we realized that the alternative is to cut costs and spend the savings on fancy ham and beers, the right choice became obvious to us.