Last November, Equinix announced they were sunsetting their Equinix Metal bare-metal offering:

There’s no bitterness towards Equinix for this, nor should their be.  As freedesktop.org notes:

First, I’d like to thank Equinix Metal for the years of support they gave us. They were very kind and generous with us and even if it’s a shame we have to move out on a short notice, all things come to an end.

Also, please keep the discussion here technical, and not fueled by any hate. Equinix doesn’t owe us anything, and the fact that they sponsored us for that long showed how dedicated they are to opensource.

According to that ticket, they’ve been given 3 months’ notice.

Before you think “well, I can donate a VPS I have idling,” note that these projects have some pretty heavy requirements.

• freedesktop.org requires a total of eleven pretty beefy servers for their Git/CI/S3 systems.  And they’re putting out 50TB of transfer every month.
• Alpine Linux needs six hefty servers, and 800TB of bandwidth every month.

That’s a lot to replace.  freedesktop.org says:

Few years ago, GCP had an open source program and they gave us credits. They suddenly disappeared and we had to pay for the expensive service while working around the clock to migrate out of it.

Equinix gave us 5 years of free datacenter, but now we have to move out from their DC with a 3 months delay or we will have to pay for what we use (and it’s expensive).

I personally think we better have fd.o pay for its own servers, and then have sponsors chip in. This way, when a sponsor goes away, it’s technically much simpler to just replace the money than change datacenter.

They estimate their costs at $288,000 per year.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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