2020-09-22

I received an email from someone who claims to be (hopefully) the culrpit. They were very sincere and honestly it was probably one of the nicest things to read in a very long time. They didn't know port scanning wasn't allowed. I realize now that I have not done an effective job of communicating that and certainly contributed to the problem.

Pretty often I feel done with SporeStack. I feel it gives me a fair amount of liability and I take the service seriously in general, I don't want to deliver something lackluster.

The truth is that I ended up moving my own blog elsewhere -- I made a personal account at Vultr and Digital Ocean. For me, it's no longer a requirement to pay in cryptocurrency. And yet at the same time, it's stupid at at Vultr I have to put down a name, email, credit card number, etc, even if I want to make crypto payments. Digital Ocean doesn't even take crypto payments.

I guess SporeStack is really for a niche market. If you don't mind having a card number on file and your name/info, Vultr is way better than SporeStack. If you can pay in fiat, then you might as well pay with that. You'll pay almost half at Vultr or Digital Ocean. But generally speaking, I'm a huge proponent of self-hosting and recommend everyone do that if possible.

I guess for every use case, self-hosting isn't possible or desirable, and sometimes you really do need to be somewhat anonymous and pay with crypto. Then maybe SporeStack is useful for you.

I don't know what the future of SporeStack is. How long it will keep going. If it can grow into something amazing and extremely self-sustaining. I have a lot of other priorities in life, so working full time and juggling live plus SporeStack can be a bit much. I do have some help with SporeStack from a really great guy -- but it's a hard thing to design it so I can just step away and take a breather if I want.

Somehow though, that email I got today renewed my hope a bit. I guess I was feeling like whoever was doing this just didn't care that this was harming me and giving me real anxiety about SporeStack ultimately getting shut down. But I was wrong, they did care afterall and didn't understand. I just didn't explain it properly.

So I will have to make some adjustments. No promises yet and I have other work (my "real job") to get back to. But I'm very happy. I'm really touched to have the customers I do. I remember someone in the early days of SporeStack saying they'd tell people at parties about it. I never knew I'd make something like that. SporeStack really isn't much, but I guess it means something to me. I appreciate that to many of you it means something to you as well.

-Teran