Freedesktop looking for new home for its GitLab instance

Visitors to the freedesktop.orgGitLab instance are currently being greeted with a message noting thatthe company who has been hosting it for free for nearly five years, Equinix, hasasked that it be moved (or start being paid for) by the end of April. Theissueticket opened by Benjamin Tissoires in order to track the planning of a move is clear that the project is grateful forthe gift:"First, I'd like to thank Equinix Metal for the years of support they gave us. They were very kind and generous with us and even if it's a shame we have to move out on a short notice, all things come to an end."

The current cost for the services, much of which is for 50TB of bandwidth data transferper month and a half-dozen beefy servers for running continuous-integration(CI) jobs, comes to around $24,000 per month. Tissoires believes that theproject should start paying for service somewhere, in order to avoidupheaval of this sort, sometimes on short or no notice. "I personallythink we better have fd.o pay for its own servers, and then have sponsorschip in. This way, when a sponsor goes away, it's technically much simplerto just replace the money than change datacenter." Various options arebeing discussed there, but any move is likely to disrupt normal servicesfor a week or more.