Lilypads in London: Kaeru moves to a bigger pond

One of our main priorities for Kaeru as a project is to make sure we can continue to exist and grow, delivering high quality services for a long time to come.

To do this, alongside a brilliant community and fabulous team, Kaeru needs somewhere to run our beautiful code so that you can access our services: a server.

When we started in 2016, the most cost-effective way to get a server was to rent space from a cloud provider (DigitalOcean, in our case, who have been wonderful.) However, over the past five years, Kaeru has grown immensely, and as the project grows the costs of continuing to rent will only increase.

The flexibility of cloud hosting has been great—especially as buying a dedicated server would have been incredibly expensive—but thanks to the support of our wonderful Patrons, donations from team members to purchase storage drives, and some intense negotiation by Lauren, we were able to put together a system using a second hand server for a very good price. :)

By investing in our own hardware upfront and taking responsibility for it ourselves, we'll be able to gradually migrate various aspects of our services from third-party cloud services and reduce *ongoing* expenses appreciably. This server should also be enough to last us a while, with lots of room for expansion should we need it, giving us unprecedented flexibility about how we allocate resources.

Whilst we still have to pay to keep the server in a datacentre ('colocation') - where rack space, power, high-speed network access and cooling are provided - and may have to pay to maintain or upgrade the hardware from time to time, we're getting a lot more performance for less money in the long term.

What's more, by investing more upfront, in the event that Patreon income were to drop we'd be in a far better position to keep the project going.

Any hardware upgrades we might need will mostly just be one-time investments, without much effect on monthly fees.

We're excited to finally share this with you, as a lot of work went into this. Finding a suitable server, negotiating colocation, travelling, and getting the server up and running hasn't been too easy, but we're here and beginning to migrate our existing services over.

Look forward to hearing more about this in the coming weeks—otherwise, that's all for now, though we'll leave you with a few photos from the trip our lead dev, Lauren (thejsa) took to London to get everything sorted, with tremendous help from Dan at our colocation partner, Netspawn Ltd :)