All servers have been migrated to Bytemark hosting

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#1

Hi all,

All the Ubuntu MATE servers, including this Discourse forum, have been migrated to new hosting. And for a very good reason.

Bytemark are a UK based hosting provider. Some of the tech team at Bytemark are using Ubuntu MATE and their CEO reached out to fully cover all the Ubuntu MATE hosting and bandwidth costs! :smiley: A significant advantage of this sponsorship from Bytemark is that more of the money raised via the Ubuntu MATE crowd-funding can be directed towards sponsoring the development of Ubuntu MATE and the MATE Desktop :smiley:

So we now have two servers, one in Manchester, England and the other in York, England. The main websites and download servers were migrated last week and this Discourse forum was switched over earlier today.

We'll be updating the website content tomorrow to reflect that Bytemark are now sponsoring the project. Bytemark and Ubuntu MATE will both release announcements about this partnership in due course.

27 Likes
#2
#3

Holly excellent news.
Many thanks to the :BYTEMARK team.

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#4

Seconded. Many thanks to Bytemark.

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#5

This is excellent news. financially! :raised_hands:
And many, many thanks to the folks at Bytemark. You rock! :clap: :ok_hand:

I just hope, with the Brexit happening, and the consequent loss of protection that users and well-intentioned businesses like Bytemark will have from the recently approved EU Privacy Act, that hosting forums in the UK won’t mean All Your Data Are Belong to the Government. The news coming from Her Majesty islands on this matter aren’t the best. At all!

But hey! Now it’s time to celebrate!

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#6

Well, you know what you need to do at the next election, then, don’t you Marfig. Vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party who would be very likely to repeal such invasive legislation.

It called “democracy”. Something which has begun to matter again a whole lot more since Brexit. And that, as as both a socialist and a democrat, I consider to be a good thing.

#7

I was also, briefly worried about this, but then I realized:

I have exactly zero piece of information on this forum that I mind being recorded.
Anyway, the only thing that’s probably not already logged by the Internet Archive (and therefore the eternal property of well, everyone who wants a copy) are private messages, and I only use those to avoid polluting the threads with ephemeral stuff, never to actually hold private conversations.

Edit: also I’ve been checking out the company’s website and I’m impressed by what I see so far.
Nice services, though a bit too expensive for my personal usage.
Good ethos and geek-friendly tools.
They also support great Open Source projects including Debian, Openstreetmap, Libreoffice and Kodi!

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#8

I think they support more than what is listed on the homepage too :slight_smile:

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#9

Much thanks to :BYTEMARK!

I didn’t check the old host but 24msec to this one in prime time is darn good. Heck, 20msec of that is the speed of light across the Big Pond! :joy:

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#10

This is awesome! :smiley:

#11

Nice to meet you @Wimpy & Ubuntu MATE users, I’m Matthew and have been Bytemark’s MD (& co-founder) since 2002.
I like seeing our cloud servers seem to take on more and more impressive loads given some of the numbers Martin has put my way :slight_smile:

We’ve supported free software authors with hosting since the start because we built a lot of our own success on that base. There’s a whole Debian rack in our York data centre. But more recently we also support any group that is making technology more accessible to more people. So we’ve sponsored diversity efforts like Railsgirls Manchester, and some political causes like the Open Rights Group and Full Fact. The causes we support are always a little bit personal to someone at the company, and not yet defined by a corporate policy :slight_smile: So if you’re involved with other free software or technology outreach that could use some hosting, do let me know.

P.S. We had a discussion at the end of last year on our forum about government intervention and how it would affect our customers’ data. I hope free software communities won’t be too much of a target for interception but obviously that’s what they’d want you to think etc. etc.

9 Likes
#12

Many thanks for Bytemark!

1 Like
#13

This is pretty cool. Is it possible to help UMate by providing more bandwidth for downloads in some way? Some kind of script I can run on a vps?