Fosshost is a UK-based open source software hosting and cloud computing provider. Fosshost’s services have been used by many well-known open source projects such as GNOME, KDE, Armbian, Debian, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu Unity and Xfce. Recently they announced that the server is about to shut down and will no longer provide services.

At first, when you visit various fosshost.org links, you will return a 404 error message. Later, fosshost.org updated a statement on the website and wrote:

At this time, Fosshost regrets to announce that we are no longer able to continue to provide our services.

In the statement on the official website, it did not disclose the specific reason for the suspension of service, but only wrote:

Due to circumstances beyond the control of Fosshost volunteers, we cannot guarantee that our servers will always be online at this time, in fact, we expect them to be offline soon. Because of this, we strongly recommend that all Fosshost users immediately back up their data and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.

In this statement, it is actually impossible to know the real reason for the closure of Fosshost. In a post related to HN, a volunteer from Fosshost gave a clearer message:

We couldn’t afford to pay for hosting, which is why our servers went offline because we couldn’t contact the CEO Thomas Markey, only he was able to access the bank account and thus get the funds.

Moreover, the CEO’s disappearance has lasted for half a year, and Fosshost’s internal staff have also resigned due to management issues. This volunteer is also the last volunteer of Fosshost.

In fact, in September of this year, Fosshost suspended its application due to scalability issues, causing inconvenience to open source projects using their services. In November, maintainers also ran into trouble trying to operate a Chicago node, which was unable to access, start, or recover because the CEO had not given permission to anyone else.

The only good news is that former Fosshost volunteers and original architects have now started building an alternative called Radix, which will offer free on-demand hosting.