Holiday Update

This year has been difficult for baraag.

In July we nearly met our demise as a community when our domain at baraag.net was seized by our longstanding registrar at the time. Through cunning scheme and sheer luck of which I will not go into detail, I tricked them into releasing the domain and managed to transfer it to another registrar.

In September we lost our hosting provider because they buckled under the pressure of false reports by a group of bad actors and decided to pull the plug on us without any warning or ability to dispute. We managed to migrate baraag to a new host with a bullet proof reputation but we took for granted the ample resources offered by our previous host. Instead of a single powerful dedicated server machine, we had to get baraag running on a less capable network of 5 VPS slices.

By October we saw the start of a mass exodus from Twitter cause the 5 VPSes to hit their ceiling at max load. I purchased another VPS slice to form a network of 6 and it barely got us through. By November we saw a massive traffic spike yet again and I had no choice but to purchase a 7th slice.

At the start of December we saw a seemingly orchestrated DDoS attack that brought baraag down for a few minutes at a time and I suspect it was the same attackers targeting ATF. I did not previously mention this anywhere because I know the attackers are watching my every public post for some confirmation of success and I refuse to feed into any claims of victory by showing distress. The attack against baraag did not last long anyways and was quickly mitigated after purchasing a DDoS protected IP.

As you can imagine, the cost to run baraag had ballooned by now. While I am grateful for the ironclad defense of our host for the 7 VPSes, I had to make the difficult decision to take a leap of faith on yet another host to truly give baraag the resources it needs. It is just not financially practical for me to keep buying more slices to add to the network.

As of today we have migrated baraag to a new server, back to a single powerful machine. Part of the hardware specs was mentioned in a previous post but here it is in full:

2x EPYC 64 core (128 cores / 256 threads)

1TB (1028GB) RAM

2x 3.84TB NVMe in RAID1

2x 480GB SSD in RAID1

I am hoping this new server will last us for at least a few years. Thank you everyone for continuing to support me. I could not keep baraag alive without you all. Merry Christmas and have a happy new year.