The Sunny Gardener - March 2025
This post is a bit later than usual because I’ve been busy looking at cherry blossoms (and ducks).
Mastodon Updates
There was a series of Mastodon software updates this month: v4.3.5, v4.3.6 and v4.3.7
These updates mostly included small fixes to server functionality.
Nicole
Hi, I’m Nicole! But you can call me the Fediverse Chick :D
The fediverse saw a wave of spam, largely consisting of accounts claiming to be Nicole, a college student from Toronto, and directing people with links to chat on other sites like Discord, Matrix, etc.
Remember!
- Nicole is not your girlfriend who lives in Canada
- Do not give Nicole your bank information
Moving To Canada, Part II
Nicole might not live in Canada, but our backups and email do!
Back in January I started working on transferring the last parts of sunny.garden that were operating on US-based services to Canada (or the EU).
I spent some time evaluating different storage providers for backups, and ended up going with Hetzner. So we now have encrypted backups in Toronto with OVH, and in Germany with Hetzner.
Moving email was the most involved, since I run my own email server and it takes time to set a new one up, but this has now also been completed so email notifications, password resets, registration, etc. are now also running from OVH in Canada.
Things Left Behind
At this point, all of the data and hosting involved in operating the server has been moved out of the US. There are a few pieces left over, which will probably stay that way.
The operator of the .garden domain registry is based in the US but there isn’t much I can do about that now, short of starting a whole new server.
The free SSL certificates are also provided by the Let’s Encrypt non-profit in the US, but if we get to the point of suddenly needing to replace those, the internet in general will probably be thrown into chaos. That’s certainly possible the way things are going, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Summary
Hosting Costs
Expand Hosting Costs
| sunny.garden | 2025-04-01 | |
|---|---|---|
| Main Server | 12-32GB-512GB | -$84 |
| Worker Server | 2-2GB-40GB | -$7 |
| Media Storage | 283 GB | -$11 |
| Media Bandwidth | Free | $0 |
| Backups | 577 GB | -$15 |
| Domain Name | $55/yr | -$5 |
| Email Server | -$5 | |
| Donations One-Time | $125 | |
| Donations Recurring | $88 | |
| Monthly Totals | ||
| Previous Balance | $98 | |
| Total Expenses | -$126 | |
| Total Donations | $213 | |
| Balance | $185 |
Canadian Dollars
As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.
– Brook