As most of you know, our EU server was hosted in a private residence in Sweden. Anyone that was on that server can attest that this setup was far from ideal, there are reasons you put servers in a datacenter, most notably: reliability. No accidental power button pushes or otherwise uncontrollable power outages, no internet issues, etc. Since the beginning we have toyed with the idea of purchasing/leasing a server somewhere in the European Union to replace this setup. Due to a lack of time and mostly money we have been for a long time unable to accomplish this goal until recently.

During the recent EU outage related to the owner moving it became clear we would need to seek alternatives. The original server was very graciously donated to our cause but, as the issues we've had with the increased capacity on the US server as an indicator, we have since grown large enough to require a more stable European presence.

I present to you all SR2, our newest server hosted in Amsterdam for us by Leaseweb. This baby boasts dual quad core xeon cpu's with 4gb of memory, enough for us to grow quite a bit before a hardware upgrade is required. The max latency to our other EU systems has capped around 40-50ms so it should be nice and snappy for our users. Even to the US it's little more than 100ms which is really the best you can expect when crossing oceans (and in some cases, atmospheres).

Brabo and I have been working diligently since the "keys" for the server we're handed to us late last week. We've finally got Debian Wheezy installed and running successfully with the grsec kernel and now all that's left is to install our package requirements and get it configured to be added to the rotation. We don't yet have an ETA on its availability due to the fact we are still waiting on Leaseweb for some minor networking setup related to ipv6.

For those of you on the US server (by choice) this means that when the EU server is up and running and available for everyone and has been stable for at least a week we will taking down the US server for upgrades. As you may have read, the EU server is running wheezy, this needs to be the case on US as well and we don't do dist upgrades without a reboot :) We estimate the upgrade and reboot should take no more than a few hours. The EU server will be available during that time for your use.

Please feel free to ask us any questions you may have in IRC or as a comment to this post.

Thanks,
Zetas