Server (As promised) Regarding new IP

[Erelei]

Hey guys,

I promised I'd make a post explaining why we moved to a different IP, so here we are.

As some of you know, my job is essentially managing servers for hundreds of thousands of clients either on VPS, Cloud KVM stacks, or Dedicated Servers. I've been doing this now for roughly 2.5 years and I've been excelling my career pretty steadily. Simply put, this is my dream job and I absolutely love what I do. Things are just looking up and up and up for me.

Before, we were paying $540 a year, which roughly equates to $45/mo for our server. My job has allowed me the pleasure of creating my own VM stack and I've done just that. Now that I have a working stack that I personally built, all I'm paying for is the internet connection and the IP, +a permanently routed voxility / DDoS protected IP for $156 a year, which equates to something like $13/mo. 

What this means is that I don't need to worry about our donations going to hosting anymore - I will pay for it exclusively. I'm absolutely fine paying the monthly premium and not requiring or requesting it from our player base. Of course, you guys are still more than welcome to donate if you want, but it won't be going to the MUD for hosting, but something more pertinent like our Forum Software and other things like advertising if needed.

I'm extremely happy so far with what I've built. I'm sorry I've been kind of 'not here' lately - this is what I've been working on. That, plus I got a big promotion at work, so my time coding has been declining for awhile while I've been focusing on my job - this doesn't mean I'm not coding anymore though; it just means I had my focus elsewhere for several months. Things should settle down soon within the next month and I can focus more here.

Anyway, what does all of this mean? Well, unfortunately, it means a new IP as you guys know. Our permanently DDoS protected IP is 170.249.233.19 - in the event that we suddenly get DDoS'd, our main IP will be null-routed in intervals of 30 minutes at a time. If this happens, I'll manually switch the listening IP to our DDoS filtered IP which will increase latency, but will stay online all the same.

If you guys have any questions let me know.

PS: FWIW, since we paid $540 already, this means we have a surplus of ~3 years of hosting until we need to begin paying for hosting fees again. As I mentioned, I'll take care of those moving forward. Our website (forum, etc) is still free. Our domain names (theforsakenlands.com, theforsakenlands.org, theforsakenlands.net) are not free, though, and are $12/year each. Help in this regard would be nice yearly. I already renewed these last week or so, so we have a year for these as well.