Plans for Winter in Manchester and London
Two is better than one
It's not clear (yet) if we'll go to London this year or next year, but London is always about one thing. Later this month it'll be a year since the trial, but to us what matters a lot more about London is the hosting. Despite us being an international team, we decided to consolidate everything around London after 17 years in the US. The situation in the US was bad back then and it has only gotten much worse since. We really would have benefited had we migrated everything to Europe a decade sooner.
Today there are final works/hacking on the datacentre (networking) in London* and tomorrow there will be more maintenance. Today we rebooted the hub (ISP) for the first time in nearly a year (this impacted IRC).
Until 2023 our hosting was partly based in the US, partly in Manchester, and partly in other parts of Europe. That helped keep costs low.
Seeing we have growing traffic levels (and lots of that is nuisance, nasty bots), we might be able to arrange a multi-site setup that makes things more robust. This is still just a hypothetical plan (in my career I've had direct, hands-on experience with HA or high-availability clusters).
From many perspectives, we're satisfied with the certainty and robustness of UK hosting, it's just that we're not yet robust/resistant enough to DDoS attacks.
We have increasingly become a "top target" in recent years. You can never accuse common targets of being too "paranoid" or too proactive. █
* It finished an hour ago:
Optical network maintenance
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.
Oct 13, 15:00 BSTIn progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.
Oct 13, 11:00 BSTScheduled - We're doing some maintenance to our optical network in telehouse. Only the management is affected during a reboot period. We do not expect this to be service affecting.
Oct 9, 14:16 BST
Image source: Stockport