EU sanctions and the shutdown of the Dalam World servers

[Morendal 8]

Hi, dear players!
The past couple of days have been very eventful for us.

In just a few days, we moved between a couple of hosting providers. The reason is that, due to EU sanctions, our servers were being shut down—so we had to relocate them.

Let’s start from the beginning.

For more than a year, we were developing our Dalam World server. At first it was Java, then Elixir. By the way, we were hiring people who know Elixir—there aren’t many such specialists, but the biggest issue was that Elixir is almost the same as Java: the same virtual machines, etc.

So we began moving toward low-level languages.
To work with low-level languages, you need your own operating system—which is exactly what we started doing. For a long time we were developing it, and by the time Dalam World launched, it was ready.

During launch, the main game server was hosted on beget (we’ve already moved away from them). But in our infrastructure, everything is quite interesting and well-structured: we never host more than one “thing” on a single server, because the database is hosted with a completely different hosting company. That’s what allowed us to migrate the server without losing anything.

When we requested an ISO image of the entire system from beget, they refused to provide it to us, saying something like “build it yourself.” But because it included our own custom development, it was hard to extract everything ourselves. In the end, we managed to pull it together anyway—but beget just stopped caring about us and about many other people who asked to enable the ability to create ISO images (this feature originally existed). And what’s even more interesting: they also forbade downloading system backups.

So we left beget successfully. After that, we looked for another host—we took OVH—but the server didn’t stay up for long: it was banned there too, because of EU sanctions.

Without thinking too much, we placed the server in Vienna. Right now the server is hosted in Austria. Since we were not able to fully restore some files (there are more than 100,000 of them), the server may have some issues—we’ll fix them quickly.

Thank you for your attention!