Ahoy hoy friends.

spoiler

We are officially in to March (you probably already knew that). Unfortunately I forgot there were only 28 days and so have had no prep time to come up with anything remotely witty as an opening paragraph, so you're stuck with whatever this sorry excuse of an opening is. Anyway, onwards!

Server Updates

This bit relates to all our services, so I'll put it at the top here!

Two big things - firstly, keep an eye out for April Fools day this year 😜 I've actually put a bit of work in this year so I'm excited.

Secondly, Hetzner who host all our servers are putting up their prices. In all fairness, this is happening across the industry as the demand for RAM soars, and Hetzner have been pretty rock solid in terms of pricing & support over the last 3 years, so I'm not too upset about it. We'll just have to keep an eye on it vs donations over the next 6 months.

After our last server update, we decided to upgrade the server to the next VPS (Virtual Private Server) tier due to the influx of new users. The cost increase at the time was minimal and gave a significant boost to performance. We now have 8 vCPUs and 16GB RAM for Piefed. If we decide to upgrade again, we'll likely swap from a shared VPS set up to a dedicated VPS which should give more consistent performance but does cost that bit more.

I'm always on the look out for Piefed.zip staff to approve new accounts and handle mod reports. If you're a regular Piefed.zip user and would like to help out, please drop me a message!

Thankfully nothing major has happened on Lemmy.zip this month. We're basically in a holding pattern of waiting for the Lemmy devs to release 1.0 so we can do the upgrade and get access to all the new goodies. Hopefully not too long to wait.

I do need to do some updates on the server and the services we run, I'll try and schedule that in the next couple of weeks.

Since enabling the cloudflare challenge across Lemmy.zip we've had no downtime or scraper incidents at all, which has been quite nice!

Please Don’t Be a Lurker!

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a signed copy of your self-published autobiography.. maybe. Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether cereal is technically a soup. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.

Donations

Thank you to everyone who read my message and donated to the cause last month ❤️ I was a bit overwhelmed with your generiousity and kindness and it all helps to keep the virtual lights on here!

As a reminder, we can only continue to exist because of the generous donations of our users. If you too truly value your freedom, please help support it for everyone with a small donation.

Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!

Liberpay (Card, Paypal)

Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is https://liberapay.com/dotzip

OpenCollective (Card)

Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is https://opencollective.com/lemmyzip

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.

Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)

We also have our Ko-Fi page if you'd rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.

Thank you!

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too! (I am a little behind with this sorry but I will update it soon!)

Sir, this is a Wendy's. Nobody wants to see your graphs.

Piefed.zip

For Piefed, we only store data for 7 days rather than 30 (because historically we had less storage space on the server) so all graphs are 7 days unless otherwise stated.

CPU:

RAM:

Current performance as of right now:

Images:

Cloudflare (these are all over 30 days):

Overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Visitors:

Lemmy.zip

CPU:

RAM:

Storage space:

Current performance right now:

Images:

Cloudflare Overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Visitors:

OK well that's it for now - March is an exciting month for me, not just because April fools is at the end but also because, for anyone who was around a year ago, my child turns 1 year old during this month which is absolutely nuts. Time has flown by so quickly (despite the long, long nights and sleep deprivation).

We're also coming up on Lemmy.zip's third birthday in June (Year one and Year two are both still up!) which is another awesome milestone!

Thank you, see you in a month!

Demigodrick