Announcing Slowservers

Today is SporeStack's 9th year anniversary! It's hard to believe it's been almost a decade.

Additionally, I'm launching SlowServers, which is similar to SporeStack in that it accepts cryptocurrency payments, but different in that the servers are not resold, but are hosted in-house! Or in-datacenter, well over an hour away.

You can send a token message if you want to launch a server there, using your SporeStack balance. At least for now, it's possible we won't offer that forever. Might be a good way to give it a try, though.

The biggest difference, from a privacy perspective, is that generally you're assumed to provide an email for SlowServers. There's no token system and far less automation. It's a very different experience. Email, while not great for privacy, is nice to have a contact means in case a server is expired. With SporeStack we have to power off those servers as the only communication signal, which isn't great.

Hosting in-house, there's also a bit more to go wrong, vs a very established Vultr or DigitalOcean. Thus if there's a maintenance or some kind of outage, email can relay that. It's not mandatory, it just makes the experience potentially better.

And right now there's no other contact methods. Maybe you have some ideas on more?

For most of you, SporeStack is probably a better fit. But SlowServers is a fair bit cheaper. Just the one region, in Spokane, and two operating system options (OpenBSD and Debian.) If you're okay with something slower than the performance you're used to getting on Vultr or DigitalOcean, and okay with only connecting to your server over IPv6, it might be a good fit.

Of course, there's also a onion site for SlowServers. And onion Gemini, and native Gemini.

There's even a picture of the 1/3 cabinet we're starting out with.

I wondered for a while about hosting in-house servers under the SporeStack brand, but some of my priorities started to shift, and SlowServers is ultimately relevant not just to those who prefer more privacy. It's quite different.

Anyway, I hope either SporeStack or SlowServers is useful for you. If not, there's a list of a alternative hosts that you can look through.

Happy New Year!