Network Maintainence + Going Forward

Hewwo!

I'm going to be making some changes in the coming months that may result in some downtime occasionally (nothing too bad). With Roy having passed ownership of the community to me, I have the ability to move a bit quicker in some renovations and changes that I've been meaning to make for awhile now. Historically, these large changes have been difficult due to Roy being a relatively busy guy outside of GFL.

The Anycast Network

It's no secret that GFL has built and operated an Anycast network for the past couple of years. This network configuration has offered us quite a few advantages, the primary advantages being A2S_INFO caching (which lowered pings in the server browsers, resulting in higher rankings overall) and DDoS protection.  We silently disabled A2S_INFO caching last month, however, due to consistent issues with other parts of the anycast setup, we believe it is best to disable it as a whole. This will require a brief maintenance period. We expect maintenance to take 6 hours and we aim to complete this process on either August 7th or August 8th depending on how long it takes to get things prepared.

DigitalOcean

A few months ago we moved some of our web services to DigitalOcean. After a few months of using it, we believe that this method of hosting our services is not as cost efficient, so we will be purchasing another web machine from OVH (most likely the INFRA-2) to migrate these droplets to. We expect this move to save us around $100 / mo.

Europe

We announced a few months ago that we would begin expanding into Europe. I am happy to announce that this machine has finally been setup and that servers are currently in development for the Europe launch. We should see the first of the European servers launching very soon.

NFO

We recently purchased a new machine for our CS:GO Zombie Escape server. This machine is a bit more expensive than the old one (about $90 / mo more), but offers significantly more processing power. We're going to be hosting a few, light weight servers on the node alongside Zombie Escape, however, the majority of the resources on that machine will be kept open to ensure the smooth operation of Zombie Escape.

That's all for now. I have some more things planned, but I think they need a bit more internal discussion before I'd like to announce them publicly.