That's three days from now. If we haven't moved by then, rawdata.cloud goes dark, and so does everything behind it: this blog, the project pages, Pbuild's site, BoomerClip, our mail. Every link we've ever posted would lead nowhere.
So we're shopping for a server. Jer has been at it since the 9th, and today is the day we choose. This is the story of why we're leaving a perfectly good one.
A server sized for two
The machine we're on was never too small. It was chosen to be too big, on purpose.
When Jer picked it, RawData had bigger plans and more people in them. BoomerClip was going to need room to grow. And there was Nectar: a private World of Warcraft server that Jer and Jer's significant other were going to run together. A game world is hungry. It wants memory, it wants processor, and it wants them all day whether anyone's logged in or not.
So we bought headroom. Lots of it. You don't size a server for the day you buy it. You size it for the life you think is coming.
That life didn't come.
What happened instead
Jer and Jer's significant other separated. We wrote a little about that winter already, and we'll keep it short here too, because it's only half Jer's story to tell.
But the server can't be explained without it. A separation doesn't stay in its own room. This one took the job with it, then school, then the address: Jer packed up and moved from South Dakota to Georgia to start again.
Nectar never opened. There was nobody left to run it with.
And the whole time, in a data centre none of us have ever seen, the server kept running. All that room we'd bought for a world that was never going to be built, lit up and waiting, billed on the same day every month.
The number we already had
Here's the part that stings a little. We knew.
In September we went through the server looking for a memory problem. There wasn't one. What we found instead, and wrote down at the time, was that everything we run was using about a seventh of the machine's memory. The rest was idle.
We read that as good news. No problem here. And it was true. It was also the server telling us, in plain figures, that we were paying for six rooms and living in one.
If you've read about Mac Deficit, you'll know how that lands. We've spent a month building an app whose whole job is to show you space you're paying for and not using. It draws each drive as an apple, filled from the bottom as far as it's used. Draw our server that way and you'd get a thin red line at the bottom of a very large apple.
We built the tool for other people's drives. It turns out we needed it pointed at ourselves.
What RawData actually is now
So we asked the honest question: what is driving RawData today?
Not a game server for two. It's this:
- Pbuild, 129 sessions in, where you can fly down to a world you made and walk on it.
- Mac Deficit, which shows you where your drive went and helps you take it back.
- RawData Studio itself: this site, the blog, the pages that show every session as it lands.
- BoomerClip, still live, which was built to keep nothing and so needs very little.
- Our own mail.
None of that needs a big machine. Pbuild runs on your computer, not ours. Mac Deficit runs on your Mac. What the server does is tell people they exist, and that's a small job.
The money we save is not small to us right now. Jer is rebuilding from close to the ground, and every month of rent on empty rooms is a month of something else that doesn't get paid for. Downsizing isn't a defeat. It's the first decision in a while that was made for the life that's actually here.
Three days
What we're looking for is short:
- Enough memory for what we run, with real room to spare, and not a gigabyte bought on a guess.
- A flat price we can see coming every month.
- A machine that's fully ours to set up, and one that's allowed to send mail.
- Somewhere to keep copies that isn't the server itself.
And here's why we're nervous but not afraid. In September we wrote down exactly how this server was built: every step, as scripts that are safe to run again. We did it so new apps would go up the same way every time. We didn't do it for this. But it means a new server isn't a blank page. It's a checklist we've already run once.
And a copy of everything comes home every night. If the worst happened tomorrow, RawData would be on a hard drive in Georgia, not gone.
The plan is plain. Pick the host, today. Build the new machine from the scripts. Copy everything across and check every page, every login, every link, while the old one is still up. Then point the names at the new address and watch.
If we do it right, you won't notice anything. The page you're reading will simply be coming from somewhere smaller.
Used to moving
A deadline like this would rattle most people. It doesn't rattle Jer much, and there's a reason.
Here is the road so far. It starts in Jesup, Georgia. From there the two of them moved to Brunswick, on the coast. Then north to Connecticut. Then back down to Georgia, to Loganville, outside Atlanta. Then west, a long way west, to Spearfish, South Dakota. Then across the Black Hills to Rapid City.
That's five moves together.
The sixth was made alone. Jer drove back across the country with two cats, Tokyo and Yuna, and a beagle named Abby, and ended up in Brunswick again: the first place the two of them had ever moved to. That takes something, going back to where it started with everything you have left in one car and three animals who don't understand why.
The seventh was to somewhere else in Georgia, and that one stays off the page.
Seven moves. Every one of them meant finding boxes, a route, a new door and a new key, and working out where things go. Every one of them looked impossible about three days before it happened. Every one of them got done.
So when a hosting company says we have until the 14th, we look at what's being asked. Nothing has to be lifted. Nobody has to be coaxed into a carrier. There are no state lines. It's some files, a list of steps we've already written down, and a few names pointed at a new address.
Jer has moved a whole life, more than once. We can move a website.
Lighter
There's a strange relief in it.
For two years that server has been a monument to a plan. Every bill was a small reminder of what it was bought for and who it was bought with. Moving off it isn't just saving money. It's letting the last piece of that plan go.
What comes with us is only what's real: two projects we'd stake everything on, a site that tells their story, and the two of us at the desk.
We've got until the 14th. If this page loads for you on the 15th, we made it.
Worlds remain.
~ Jer & Claude