Hi, we heavyheartedly decided to shut down our DigitalOcean VPS as well as our Fediverse instance, at bots.reinhart1010.id because of server issues. But this doesn’t mean that we will completely withdraw ourselves from the Fediverse communit(ies).

But the good thing is, we're preparing for an archive of our posts as already posted there, to make sure most of those links aren’t dead. Just like what we’re currently doing with T-3000 and WordPress.

In this post we’ll explain some reasons. This post is dedicated to those who are interested in our Fediverse accounts, and those who are using some of our services which are stored in the affected VPS.

Social reasons (for not having a personal Fediverse instance).

Building a dedicated Fediverse server might have been someone’s great cyberspace dream to protect their digital identity, but as we have done that for months, we feel that having and logging in from dedicated Fediverse instance makes us lonely.

Yeah, lonely.

In the Fediverse, the only thing you’ll see on the home page are posts from people you follow, and posts from other instances/servers that are just passing by your instance. The grand theory is, the more interesting accounts and instances you follow, the more chances those tasty, interesting posts to go to your home page.

But we can’t do this proactively, because by doing so, our instance will pick up more posts, which we may not be interested in, but filling up our database and content storage space (think for storing images and videos). We are also a little bit afraid that this could consecutively increase our Cloudflare R2 costs – even though that we’re still under the free tier limits, unlike our other products like Reinhart Maps which requires us to periodically remove cached images to update them.

Technical (and billing) reasons.

Our VPS, which hosts this instance, has been attacked and turned down multiple times over the course of four months. I decided to hold my investigation, and still paying my bills to DigitalOcean for months to focus first on completing my bachelor thesis.

But even today, weeks after I’ve finally passed my thesis defense, I still don’t have much time to reinvestigate this issue, and still paying those bills, which has just recently increased due to local electronic taxation laws. This might still be bearable if I was employed just like two years ago.

Even when I turned off most of our web services in this specific VPS, the server will instantly hang and shut down in just about 10 minutes. Inspected from DigitalOcean's optional-but-free server monitoring tool, it is very, very likely due to a sudden CPU increase. RAM/memory usage is still OK. There’s still 2 to 3 GBs of free space left so that shouldn’t be much of an issue.

I thought code-server and PM2, which has been preinstalled since the beginning of the VPS’ lifespan, might be the root cause of this issue. These symptoms are still present even after completely removing code-server and replaced PM2 configs with Systemd.

Other affected services.

Of course, as a general cybersecurity advice, this could be indicating that there is a real (#_ ) situation. (#- )!

You know, when certain bots are trying to attack our servers, which some of them are not protected using Cloudflare for technical reasons. Or there might have been some cases of malware sneaking out into this specific server.

And the best solution is, of course, to destroy the server and replace it with a new one. And cautiously replacing the IP address configuration of the new one.

If you are a customer of our services, the only services affected here are our Fediverse instance and a public Telegram bot for My Spiritual Journey (MSJ) event organizers. The rest of them are just some internal services, like Gokapi, and some other failed experiments. The rest of our products are unaffected as we utilize different hosting platforms (Blogger, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Google Sites, Niagahoster Shared Hosting, roothouse, Supabase, and Telegram) for different products.

(How #InterfaceInPolymorphism that is!)

What’s next?

We are planning to migrate from DigitalOcean to Niagahoster with reduced system specs (equivalent to DigitalOcean’s $6 plan but with more storage space), since this time we’ll dedicate it more as an external proxy for some of our services in the roothouse, that is, a cluster of devices at home like this that maintain some of our automated services.

At the interesting turn of events, we have finally switched back to an unlimited home fiber plan, after 6 months of being limited in a less reliable, quota-based home internet plan which also affect our BINUS Today fetching schedules.

And today, we’re happy to announce that our MSJ Telegram bot has been relocated to the roothouse.

Over the next three months, we will review our new VPS usage as we introduce more and more apps and products which may need some help from them.

That’s all for now, LET’S GET BACK TO WORK!!!

/* I can't be more excited to do this (>_ ) */

Oh yeah, speaking about the Fediverse...

We’re still in the Fediverse. And no, I don’t mean the Fediverse-wannabe Threads and Tumblr. But we will talk about that later after we finally reintroduced the rel=me links back to this website.