As of this morning the Republic has been fully migrated to a new
hosting provider, with a new admin. I launched the Republic in 2018
[0] as the second circumlunar.space outpost, and for just over four
years I have been the lone owner and sysadmin. I had been feeling
some burnout, however, due to the demands of my real-life job as a
sysadmin and some pending changes I knew I had to make. The FreeBSD
version I initially installed (v11) was past end-of-life, and I was
no longer able to install security or package updates. The hosting
provider (Tilaa) had, at the end of January, given me 30 days notice
that they were raising my monthly VPS rates by 80%, and were not
interested in working with me as far as a more reasonable rate. The
Republic is a small VPS, and the rates they were quoting were well
above industry standard rates. Customers have little power in these
circumstances apart from not being customers in the first place, so
I'll just say here that you should avoid Tilaa as a VPS hosting
provider. Thankfully, there are lots of alternatives that are
cheaper and easier to work with.

Earlier this month I posted to the internal bbs that I was looking
to step down as sysadmin and would help move the Republic to a new
hosting provider. Luckily the Zaibatsu user Mieum volunteered to
take over. He did most of the work to migrate users, data and system
configurations to a new host, which is now officially online. I
admit to feeling a sense of relief to being a normal
circumlunar.space user again - while the demands of being the
Republic admin were not great, they were still a responsibility that
weighed on me.  Thanks to Mieum of course, and to Solderpunk and
Katolaz, the other outpost admins for offering help and support
during the migration. And thanks to the users who offered
encouragement along the way.

[0]: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7eslugmax/phlog/2018-12-15-registration-open-republic