t/suki host migration upcoming on 2026-01-23
Before the migration, in an abundance of caution, please back up anything important such as git repositories from git.tsuki.games. Make plans to not have access to these services during the migration time.
If you have any questions about the migration, please ask them here. If anything needs to be asked of me during the migration, you can email me or contact me on Discord (DM me for these contact details now if you don’t have them).
As mentioned in the chatplace for t/suki topic, I am going to replace the Discourse chat service with Matrix. However, before this can be done I must first:
- Migrate forum.tsuki.games and git.tsuki.games to a new host. (I am planning on migrating to Hetzner, for their lower costs. If you have an alternative suggestion, I am open to considering it.)
- Migrate the account systems to use SSO, so that you are automatically signed into all services after logging in once.
These things need to be done in order to reduce the cost of maintaining these services as well as make them easier to access for members.
During the migration, the forum and the gitplace will be shut down, and will not be available again until migration is completed. Since I have never completed such a migration before, I cannot make a good estimate of when it will be completed. I am hoping it can be performed within 24 hours, but I am reserving four days in case it takes longer. Hopefully, everything goes smoothly and I can bring the site back up in a prompt manner. 
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Best of a luck for a smooth migration and Godspeed!
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I realized that I haven’t explained everything:
This migration is currently planned to move us from Atlantic to Hetzner, in order to reduce the cost of running t/suki.
At Atlantic, I currently pay:
- ~$24/mo for two of the lowest VPS tier + backups
At Hetzner, I can potentially pay:
- ~€8/mo for two of the lowest VPS tier + backups
I desire cost reductions because I anticipate an increase in computing needs when Matrix is added and I do not have the ability to bankroll that all on my own at the moment.
Unfortunately, I have recently become aware (thanks to @outfrost) that Hetzner apparently has a history of hostility to the LGBTQ+ community and has shut down sites arbitrarily (and on very short notice, due to a German law requiring that of them):
There’s a few ways we can deal with this:
- We find a different host that is both cheaper than Atlantic and more ethical than Hetzner. Note that I’m not willing to consider AWS or GCP.
- We stay with Atlantic and I receive more funding from others to help pay for the website. Note that I unfortunately don’t currently have a non-profit incorporated for t/suki, so you’d have to take me at my word.
- We go with Hetzner anyway, knowing the risk.
I will do some research of my own as well, but I would be happy to hear any opinions y’all may have.
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Assuming we go with the route of staying with Atlantic and you field some funding to support t/suki, how much would you need per month to be stable?
That’s a great question. The total cost will either be ~$24/mo or ~$36/mo.
This is because after we add Matrix, we will either find a need to increase computing capacity or we will find that we don’t need it. Right now we have two G3.2GB servers, both of which cost $10/mo, and the next tier G3.4GB costs $20/mo (and backups cost +20%).
I could technically continue paying $24/mo out of pocket, though I still desire a reduction in cost… but $36/mo is too much for me. So, I would like at least $12/mo in contributions in such a scenario. However, to be honest, I’m not terribly excited to take contributions at the moment because I’d rather we set up some kind of formal, reliable system for this that makes it easier to track where the money is going and how it is being spent.
To describe how much of a cost reduction Hetzner is, I want to point out that they provide more computing power at their lowest tier compared to Atlantic, so I think it’s possible we won’t even need the next tier when Matrix is added. But, even if we did, the price when considering the next tier is still ~€11/mo due to a finer gradient of computing options, which is significantly cheaper than Atlantic and is a bigger cost savings than having $12/mo in contributions from members.
Hetzner also gives us the option of downgrading in-place, but Atlantic does not. So, if we ever upgrade to G3.4GB on Atlantic and find ourselves not needing the extra compute, I’m stuck with the cost unless I do some work to migrate the instance – which is a huge pain (it would be like switching hosts).
For what it’s worth, I did some additional research on Hetzner, and it seems that the anti-LGBT activity never broke the news or made it onto the Wikipedia page. It’s possible that the posts I mentioned earlier misrepresented or over-sensationalized the problem and it’s not as widespread as it might first appear.
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