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Statement from Fosshost's Founder

by dikiaap on 12/13/22, 1:47 AM with 7 comments

• by wlesieutre on 12/13/22, 1:56 AM

  Related discussion 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33848529

  In the comments it essentially boils down to "We are unable to pay for co-location costs, and that's why our servers will go offline as Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds." Given the whole FTX situation lately I read that like CEO was disappearing with a bunch of other people's money.

  "Founder" in today's post is the CEO mentioned above, he writes "We'll also be divesting Fosshost's existing resources, including our hardware assets and any vendor agreements we can transfer, and providing them as grants to organisations trying to solve the same goals we were."

  Hopefully this formal shutdown instead of "well, nobody who actually works on this can access the money to pay the bills, I guess we're shutting down" means that things are being closed down appropriately and any remaining resources will go to related causes.

• by cameron_b on 12/13/22, 2:42 AM

  I feel bad for the vendors ( Ampere, colo-hosts ) in this. It's a huge loss for the community that utilized it too, but there's a part of this that seems to resonate with my high-school dreams... I oogled the shiny big-iron racks in EWeek, and thought of the cool stuff I could do if I owned one of those dual Opteron boxes with so much RAM and all the gigs of storage (hundreds!)...

  I'm glad nobody dropped tens of thousands of dollars of servers on me before I discovered the weaknesses in my dreams and that servers are the cheap part if you haven't solved for cooling, power, network, people and moving money around.

• by bee_rider on 12/13/22, 2:16 AM

  I’m confused as to why they were doing an apparently overwhelming amount of development, and what about hosting code (that’s what they did, right?) is so architecture specific.

  But, sounds like they got in over their head on a well-intentioned project so, hope the CEO gets a little time to de-stress.

• by pabs3 on 12/13/22, 7:20 AM

  Does anyone have a list of services they hosted? ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) would like to put those on archive.org. The aarch64/fosshost sites got archived already.

• by walrus01 on 12/13/22, 2:18 AM

  I am morbidly curious as to exactly what scale (in dollars, rack space occupied, term length, wattage and bandwidth commits) of colocation contracts they really got into. And in how many places.