The Sunny Gardener - March 2026

– strange things among the stones by @lichendust

Ten Years Of Mastodon

The Mastodon project celebrated its 10th anniversary on March 16th. (sunny.garden however is coming up on 4 years old).

Mastodon v4.5.8 was released addressing some security issues as well as other mostly behind the scenes fixes.

DNS Issues

Around March 12, the DNS servers provided by our domain registrar CanSpace began experiencing periodic outages, lasting 5-20 minutes, multiple times per day. During this time you might not have been able to access the website, and other servers would not have been able to deliver or receive messages with sunny.garden, though Mastodon’s retry functionality should have delivered the messages eventually.

While I don’t have dedicated DNS monitoring, you can see roughly when the outages occurred by the black gaps in the charts because the dashboard I’m using wasn’t able to look up the server to connect to it and collect data during those periods:

I filed a support ticket with CanSpace, and received two responses, the first essentially saying that their servers appeared to be working fine at the moment, and that they reliably served many domains, and the second suggested that we use another DNS service as a backup. I’ve been generally satisfied with CanSpace’s services until now, but this was a pretty unhelpful.

Regardless, I looked into Canada based DNS providers, and switched our domain’s DNS servers to easyDNS on March 16.

easyDNS charges by query volume, and I had no visibility what ours would be before I made the switch. It started off at around 180k queries per day and, after a few config changes, is now averaging 96k queries/day. This puts us within their “Pro” tier (5M queries/month), which will cost about $50/year.

So far there have been no further DNS issues since switching, and the pricing is reasonable, so hopefully this will serve our needs for a while.

Summary

Hosting Costs

As mentioned above, we have a new monthly expense for DNS hosting. This year’s domain name renewal also increased slightly.

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