Bytemark's new owners (for the last few years) IoMart are looking to tackle their steadily declining share prices by stopping all support on Bytemark's BigV hosting system. They offer to replace our VPS will one from their standard fleet, but as they are no longer the technical-lead organisation they were, but a set of financial engineers, I would like, if we are to move the hosting, to put work into moving it to a different organisation. Specifically I have in mind Mythic Beasts with whom I am moving my personal hosting from Bytemark.

A summary of our current hosting position is this. We have a single VPS, dennis.accu.org, with 2Gb RAM and a single vCPU. This runs the following services:

• Main ACCU website.
• The old ACCU website, now used only for membership administration until a better solution is found.
• The ads server.
• The blog aggregator - a WordPress site.
• Git repository (Gitea - thing a GitLab type system) and main website build.
• A small wiki.
• Conference organisation website and tooling.
• Email, mailing lists and mailing list admin website.

Disc space - we currently have 44Gb main store and 100Gb archive store - was a perennial problem until a recent expansion of the archive store.

Publication of popular articles in particularly Overload can cause load spikes that seriously degrade website performance. We don't have much headroom.

On the plus side, ioMart have not yet stopped Bytemark's generous provision of the above (except for the recent increase in storage) gratis.

For me, a change in hosting should aim to achieve the following goals.

1. Relieve storage pressure.
2. Split main website hosting onto a separate host. At present, any CPU or IO heavy operation on the host (such as making changes to the website and building the website) impacts website performance.
3. Introduce host configuration management and configuration version management.
4. Ensure configuration is managed in a way that allows services to further distributed across separate hosts as requirements change.
5. Add a CI tool to manage builds of the main website.

We also need to update the OS version, and this in turn will mean moving the mailing lists from MailMan2 to MailMan3. This is a considerable change.

I run a personal server setup that is not dissimilar to the ACCU setup, though with rather less traffic. I have recently completed the process of moving this from Bytemark to Mythic Beasts. Specifics are:

• Two hosts configured.
• All certificate generation done on the main host and distributed to other host.
• Gitea and Jenkins moved.
• Main website moved.
• Music part of Morris side website moved. This includes a substantial build process.
• Move two WordPress websites.
• Move email hosting.
• Move two small MailMan mailing lists.

Almost uniquely, I believe, Mythic offer hosting on Raspberry Pis. Pi hosting means you get a dedicated, not virtual, host with network attached storage, at an rather attractive price. I have two hosts, one a Pi3 w/ 1Gb RAM and the other a Pi4 w/ 4Gb RAM, both with 100Gb network attached storage. For these I am forking out the princely sum of 15GBP per month. That's all together, not each.

The one downside of this offering is that only IPv6 connectivity is provided. Mythic observe that the annual cost of a single IPv4 address now exceeds the const of the entire computer. They do, however, provide website IPv4 proxying, which I find works very well, and also IMAP proxying, plus NAT64 to handle outbound traffic to IPv4 addresses. Inbound email needs to be passed through their servers, and I have yet to experiment with this. It does mean I can't run spam detection and rejection on connection. However, I have learned that the Mythic email servers run exactly the same spam setup as I currently use - rspamd and rejecting anything from a host on the SpamHaus ZEN blacklist - so at present I expect this setup to actually simplify my host configuration.

I am using SaltStack for configuration management, and (of course) keeping Salt configurations under version control.

If I can successfully complete this personal project, I suggest ACCU considered following a similar course. For ACCU use I would suggest we go for a pair of RPi4s, but 4Gb RAM, one with 100Gb and the other with 200Gb network attached storage. Paid annually, that would cost 20.50GBP inc VAT per month and give us permitted bandwidth of 2Tb per host per month, which should comfortably accommodate our needs. (I should explain that right now I am typing on my laptop, which for reasons has a US keyboard, and I can't find the GBP sign).