New server, new sponsor

It shouldn’t surprise you, but here we have an obsession for self-hosting. We fought off many requests to migrate our hosting to Github (even before it was cool to hate Github - Prosody and Github were both founded in the same year!).

As a result, we self-host our XMPP service (of course), our website, our code repos, our issue tracker, package repository and our CI and build system.

This is not always easy - our project has always been a rather informal collaboration of individuals, meaning it’s not a commercial venture and we don’t have any employees. For better or worse, we’re firmly rooted in the free and open-source software principles that focus on growing communities rather than profits.

As a result, we love working with people who have similar roots and values.

For many years we had a happy home for our servers with Bytemark, who were very supportive of open-source projects, including ours (they used Prosody themselves for communication, and some of their employees contributed to the project). We are grateful to them for sponsoring the hosting of our build server for many years. However, all good things come to an end - and when Bytemark was acquired in recent years by the much larger iomart Group PLC enterprise as part of a string of other acquisitions, we knew our good times with them were likely drawing to a close.

This was recently confirmed, as we and the other remaining Bytemark customers were notified that all services are being moved to another location and another of iomart’s brands. We also received an email to inform us that our sponsorship would no longer be in effect after this transition. The monthly price we were told we would have to pay for the server was many multiples of what an equivalent server would cost by today’s standards, even if we had income to pay for it.

So, we bid a final farewell to Bytemark! But as one chapter ends, another can begin.

At the time of the acquisition, many ex-Bytemark customers recommended various alternatives. However among those, one independent provider, Mythic Beasts, really stood out. You may have stumbled across them already, for their innovative Raspberry Pi hosting and handling Raspberry Pi launch announcements on a stack of Raspberry Pi devices, or you may have come across them on the Fediverse via their (self-hosted, of course) @beasts Mastodon account. As well as Raspberry Pi hosting, of course they also offer conventional (dedicated and virtual) servers, DNS, traditional web space, and more.

Mythic Beasts turned out to be just what we were looking for - a no-nonsense service-driven provider where you’ll find founders answering support tickets and where providing amazing service and having fun while doing so are deemed more important than maximizing growth and shareholder value.

Running services with a hosting provider is a kind of partnership that requires placing a certain amount of trust. Trust that they are competent, that it’s easy to contact someone if things go wrong, and that their values are aligned with yours for the long term. It’s hard to find providers that tick all these boxes.

Having used Mythic Beasts for a few things personally in recent years, I felt increasingly confident they would be a good home for Prosody’s infrastructure too. In fact they’ve been very supportive and understanding from the moment I reached out about Prosody’s situation, and have generously provided us with capacity to migrate all our services across and retire our old servers. You may have noticed a few blips in recent weeks as we did just that. Thanks for bearing with us!

All our services are now running smoothly on VMs provided by Mythic Beasts, and we can’t thank them enough as they enable us to continue our journey. It feels great to be with a provider that not only knows but cares about things like open-source, environmental impact, as well as IPv6, DNSSEC and all the other internet tech we care about too.

For those of you curious, here’s a list (probably not exhaustive) of things we are currently running as part of the project’s infrastructure:

• Prosody, of course, for our community and development chats, notifications and alerts, etc.
• Email (we use postfix)
• Our website
  • Our main website is powered by our own Makefile + pandoc static generator
  • Our blog uses Hugo
  • modules.prosody.im is again a custom generator (triggered automatically by pushes to the repo)
• Our code repositories are served using hgkeeper, which helps us sensibly manage repos and access control
• Our issue tracker (we wrote this one ourselves, in search of something open-source, flexible and bloat-free)
• Continuous Integration, builds and packages are handled by buildbot
• Debian package repository, generated using reprepro

If you notice any post-migration issues with our site or services, drop by the chat and let us know! Also, if you’re in need of hosting, now you know where we would suggest looking first :)

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