As many of you know, certain services of mine
are currently experiencing downtime.
These services include the Eternal Jukebox,
Jenkins, my Maven domain, as well as a few other miscellaneous sites and
features.
The announcement I sent out was intentionally
vague, as I've been trying to work out exactly how to word this, and how
to work around it.
However, it's time to put everything on the
table, as to what has happened, and why it's happened.
The services I run all use Google Cloud
services, hosted in a variety of locations (Primarily US based as that's
where I get most of my traffic).
This includes the compute engines for Jenkins
and the Eternal Jukebox, the Cloud SQL server for the Eternal Jukebox
and SPIRAL, as well as Cloud Storage for all of my projects.
These have all been paid for by me, and while
it's put strain on me I was prepared to burden that due to starting
these projects for others, rather than personal gain.
However, that is no longer feasible.
Over the last two months, life has not been too
nice to me, unfortunately. Costs are slightly higher, while money has
been a lot tighter.
There's been personal stress, issues with
education, and more. A whole variety of problems have come up that have
made development difficult, and has cut funding a bit short.
Two days ago, shortly before I made the
announcement on the SPIRAL and Eternal Jukebox servers, I received a
notice that my Google services had been suspended.
This is why the announcement was sent out, and
why services ceased functioning shortly prior.
List of services that stopped functioning:
While I am working to pay off the unpaid invoice
now, moving forward the financial stability of these services is
uncertain.
It's sooner than I'd like, but I have set up a
Patreon account here
to try and community fund the lifetime of these services where
possible.
I fully intend to keep developing projects and
continue work on them as long as I can, and where possible I will try
and keep services online. At the end of the day, almost all my work is
public on Github, so even past the point of a service not being runnable
for a while, people are free to host their own.
In addition, if you'd rather make a one off
donation, you can do that here.
As an alternative to PayPal, feel free to use
Ko-fi;
If flat out donations aren't quite your style, I
am open to doing commissions, contact me either on Discord at
UnderMybrella#4076 or at undermybrella at abimon.org.
If you can't/don't want to contribute, that's
fine too, don't worry about it. This is designed to be a suppliment
where needed, and I'll do everything I can personally to keep this
running.
Currently, of all the services the Eternal
Jukebox is the only one running at the moment. The reason for this, is
that I'm running a copy locally on my computer, which is far from ideal
for a few reasons.
Firstly, Australian internet isn't the best,
which means response times are not going to be ideal, as both my speed
is limited and bandwidth is too. If I get too many requests, I won't be
able to run it for long.
Secondly, due to me using my computer and having
to move it, I can't guarantee the site will always be up. Processing
should be a little faster, but speed and uptime are going to take a hit.
There's no way to work around that at this time.
Running the server locally in a tower is another
option if it comes to it, but internet speed is a big concern,
especially considering some of the traffic the site was receiving
earlier.
I don't know how long the services will be
offline for. It highly depends on my financial situation, how things go
in my personal life, and how quickly I can sort everything out.
I ask for your patience most of all, so that
these services can be restored in due time, I hope.
I thank you for your patience, and for reading
this. Hopefully this will be just a slight detour in the lifetime of
these services.
- Isaac