[Nut-upsdev] NUT CI farm: New hosting needed from 2027

Wed Oct 7 12:47:46 BST 2026

For the last 20+ years I have hosted 8 servers in my home, and run a 
"cloud" business off of them.  (email and web hosting)

Although the glory days of that are past (it's now mainly for my own 
amusement since I'm no longer actively marketing that business it's just 
not that profitable anymore) the simple fact is that you are being 
bigoted and looking down your nose at "maintainers homes" and this "home 
office" spouting.

For 20 years my home was "the cloud" for many customers most 
businesses.  Still is for some.

People's perceptions are that "the cloud" is this magical mystical 
thing.  It is not.  It is hardware, electricity, power, cooling, 
buildings, telco cabling and everything.  There is absolutely no 
difference between a data farm in the podunk sticks in California and a 
bunch of servers in it than the basement of your house you live in other 
than size.

Remember what Yoda said:

"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? And 
well you should not. For my ally is the Internet, and a powerful ally it 
is."

"The Cloud" is everywhere these days.  There is actually no difference 
really between the PC you are typing on and any other PC on the 
Internet.  Your PC could be hosting a webserver right now under your 
nose and you might not even know it, (assuming you have secure boot 
disabled and someone put a rootkit on it)

I was an employee of Central Point Software back in 1993 when they first 
"connected to the Internet" a 9600bps Telebit Trailblazer modem to 
UUnet.  I spent a decade prior to that in the dialup BBS scene.  At one 
time there were BBS networks with hundreds to maybe thousands of nodes - 
all in "people's home offices" this was 40 years ago.  And they were 
tied together with networking that was crude compared to what we have 
today, running on PC's that had a thousandth of the power of a junked 
OpenWRT router in a Goodwill bin somewhere.

You have completely swallowed the KoolAid here with this notion that you 
have to PAY MONEY to a "cloud service provider"   You and all 
maintainers are "cloud service providers" to each other - or could be 
with a little effort and a copy of pfsense and a discarded PC with 2 
NICs in it that can act as a VPN server and router for your "home 
office" network.  These cloud service providers might be big and wealthy 
and have large buildings but they are giving you barely a sliver of this 
a meager grudgingly small slice.  And the fact that they are starting to 
pull in their horns and aren't handing out free stuff anymore just means 
more and more businesses are copping wise to this and asking the obvious 
question "I'm forking over $10k in space rent & utilities a month for my 
office I'm forking over $500 a month in fiber connection fees why the 
HELL do I need to pay a cloud provider when I can just have a server HERE"

The Internet didn't start with a giant network of datacenters across the 
country.  It started small in thousands of labs in thousands of closets 
across the world.

Un-learn what you have been conned into believing by datacenter 
companies who just want to take your money,  "the cloud" is just a 
phrase they invented to con people into paying for what they could do 
themselves. "The Cloud" started half a century ago in 1976 when Mike 
Lesk at Bell Labs wrote UUCP and hooked it up between Bell Labs 
facilities.  It has always been with us and was NOT invented by Amazon 
and Google.

Ted

On 10/1/2026 12:30 AM, Jim Klimov via Nut-upsdev wrote:
> Hello all,  (also posted as 
> https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725)
>
> Things are good while they last, but... DigitalOcean announced that 
> they will be sun-setting the effort that allowed us to host the NUT CI 
> farm core in their infrastructure:
>
>     We’re reaching out to share an important update regarding the
>     DigitalOcean Open Source Credits Program.
>
>     DigitalOcean has decided to sunset the Open Source Credits
>     Program. As part of this change, we are no longer accepting new
>     credit applications or approving credit renewals, extensions, or
>     additional credit requests.
>
>     If you currently have Open Source Credits that have already been
>     granted, those credits will continue to be honored according to
>     their existing terms and conditions. No action is required for
>     your existing credit allocation.
>
>     Additionally, the dedicated inbox for the Open Source Credits
>     Program will stop being monitored as part of this transition. For
>     any further questions or assistance, please submit your inquiries
>     through our standard support channel:
>     https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/support
>
>     We appreciate your participation in the DigitalOcean Open Source
>     Credits Program and the work you do to support the open source
>     community. Thank you for being part of the program.
>
>     Best wishes, ...
>
> We have roughly until April 2027 to find a new hoster for our VMs with 
> Jenkins and a number of uncommon operating systems (illumos, *BSD, 
> many generations of Linux containers) to continue ensuring 
> cross-platform and cross-decade portability of NUT. While duplicates 
> for most of these build agents exist in maintainers' homes, it is our 
> belief that at least the core build orchestration and logging server 
> (and ideally at least one of each kind of its agents) should be out 
> there in the cloud, independent of any one's home office.
>
> This mailing thread or issue #3725 
> <https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725> will help us 
> collect pointers (or offers) about sponsored hosting that would pick 
> us up. Community members, please feel welcome to chime in!
>
> Notes from technical experience starting with Fosshost and 
> technical+financial with DigitalOcean, where this amounted to cca 
> $300/month with existing usage:
>
>   * OpenIndiana (also hosting Jenkins): public IPv4(+IPv6?) address,
>     500Gb+ storage, 8+GB RAM, 6+ cores; storage controller support was
>     picky (in ProxMox): MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 worked, and some I/O
>     latency reservation was needed for ZFS to not give up on the disk
>     pool when their host was busy; interaction with DigitalOcean QEMU
>     was okay on storage side, but it took cca 2 hours in
>     shutdown/reboot scenarios to softly go from "Halting system" to
>     actually off - in case of maintenance, had to "Turn off" externally
>   * Linux (with many native and qemu containers): 500Gb+ storage, 4+GB
>     RAM, 8+ cores; storage controller: virtio SCSI
>   * OmniOS: 100Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller
>     support was picky (in ProxMox): MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 worked
>   * FreeBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller:
>     virtio SCSI
>   * OpenBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller: IDE
>     (maybe SATA or virtio would work too)
>   * If it would be possible to get more VMs to test more OS
>     distributions and/or releases (e.g. latest and less recent BSDs),
>     or get some native non-x86 environments, to make sure NUT remains
>     compatible with what people have deployed in reality - that would
>     be awesome!
>
> Jim Klimov
>
>
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