Note  51  Vingilote    (04/02/26 17:19)  Server Testers Wanted

    The Two Towers MUD is currently hosted on a Rackspace OpenStack 
Public Cloud platform which announced that it is doubling its prices, 
effective February 10, 2026.  Financially, we were breaking even in 
terms of Patreon donations and expenses before the price increase.  
While we have savings to absorb the 100% cost increase for a while, 
it is not financially sustainable for T2T to continue to be hosted 
on a Rackspace server long term.
 
    We have begun researching other server options and have selected 
DigitalOcean for our top consideration due to its data ownership policy, 
as this service would allow us to maintain ownership over T2TMUD data.  
While the costs of the DigitalOcean server have not been formalized, 
we estimate that it will be ~1/3 of the Rackspace price before the 
doubling, which would result in significant cost savings.
 
    In addition to cost savings, migrating the server will also allow 
us to test (and hopefully fix) several known server issues, including 
the memory leak and hang-ups we’ve experienced in the past that have 
required administrator intervention to fix.
 
Our current plan:
 
    A copy of the current version of the MUD (T2TMUD) has been erected 
on a DigitalOcean server (which we are calling MordorMUD).  Vildoran is 
in the process of testing the server for compatibility and stability 
and needs people to volunteer their activity there and tinker around to 
help identify potential server migration hiccups.
 
    We are asking players to help test MordorMUD in the month of April.  
For fun, Vildoran has turned off PvP flags and lawsys on MordorMUD.  
Character experiences and changes in MordorMUD will not impact your 
“real” character on T2TMUD.  T2TMUD will continue to exist as the 
real, permanent MUD.
 
    If all goes well during the April testing phase, we are aiming to 
migrate to this new server later this summer, when we move a fresh copy 
of T2TMUD to the new server.  Once we have migrated and verified that 
the new server is stable with no issues as the “primary” T2TMUD, the 
existing Rackspace server will be decommissioned.
 
    If you have questions, please direct them to Vildoran.  The best 
way to help is to be active doing player-y things within the game rules 
on the MordorMUD server, unless instructed otherwise:
 
https://mordor.t2tmud.org
or
mordor.t2tmud.org 9999