Maintenance Mode

SporeStack is now in maintenance mode. No more new signups.

I hate to do this, but the past month has had an incredible amount of abuse. Completely unsustainable.

It's gotten to the point where I am extremely skeptical of every token and that isn't fair to my customers nor to myself. I also don't want to earn money on malicious use. I never intended SporeStack to be used for hacking, phishing, mass scanning, botnet controllers, etc.

I was unhappy raising the minimum to $1,000, but needed to buy myself some time. So many existing malicious tokens to deal with, let alone the new ones.

A $1,000 minimum prices out most legitimate users as it is. I also don't like holding so many funds, either. But even $1,000 was not enough.

Today, I found a brand new $1,000 token with 250 servers with the hostname of masscan01-masscan250. Certainly not a nice way to start work for the morning.

The servers are deleted and the token is banned, hopefully before it could do too much damage.

About a week ago I had to shut down a token for exploiting Plex installs and installing Monero miners. I've had at least 3 complaints (submitted through Vultr) about the exact same thing. I hate that I profited on that.

Existing customers can keep using SporeStack for as long as they want. I have no end in mind. Revenue will dwindle and dwindle over time, buying me time to switch to other work. I'll work more on Slow Servers, of course, as long as I can keep abuse from being an issue there. I am hoping to get Slow Servers to the point of being profitable enough to be worth my time, and I've committed to run it to at least 2030 regardless of loss/low profit. But I don't suspect it will be enough to provide more than the minimum for my family, so I will need other work.

I am debating if I should pursue odd jobs and more work with my hands, or find a local tech job. I don't know.

I am open to selling SporeStack, to the right buyer (likely only US-based,) for a large sum. Somewhere between $100k and $1M. I am not sure about the ASN and IP blocks, which I currently use for Slow Servers. Well, not the ASN yet anyway. It should provide good income for some time, but I know it will become less and less over time without new tokens. I don't know if someone wants to solve the abuse issue by some means and continue on with it. I think realistically, SporeStack takes one person to run it and pays them a good salary, but it's not sustainable as a business model unless it grows considerably.

I am also open to selling the API codebase itself, but want to hold out in case someone wants the entire business. Though I am nervous of a vulnerability being found that way that could be exploited against existing customers, so maybe not.

Most likely, I'll just keep it going as it is and keep removing the many existing malicious tokens as they appear. I think many malicious users have created many tokens, possibly to have as backups. It makes for a very tricky situation for me.

Thank you for your time and support over the years. Closing down new signups is the best way to guarantee that I can continue to serve existing customers rather than getting the whole thing shutdown. It's easier on my conscience as well. I don't want to make money on such nefarious use. I cringe to think that possibly the majority of my customers are malicious, but I have no way to know. Clearly many are, and that's never what I meant for SporeStack.

Sincerely,

Teran McKinney (Mycelium)