Toni Dimaano Tech 12.04.2022 23:Dec PM EST

Fosshost Reaches 'End Of Life,' CEO Remains Unreachable Amid Shutdown

The open-source software provider Fosshost announces that they will no longer be hosting and providing cloud computing services to its users, following months of not hearing from its CEO.

According to Fosshost project volunteers, they have no choice but to stop operations due to circumstances out of their control, which can not guarantee that its servers will stay online.

Fosshost Continues To Struggle Without A Leader

Fosshost is a UK-based non-profit, providing services to high profile open-source projects like GNOME, Armbian, Debian, and Free Software Foundation Europe without any charge.

However, that may soon change as the project has reportedly reached its end of life with various Fosshost links returning as 404 error messages.

Fosshost says that this is because the servers will go offline shortly due to the issues the project is facing that makes them no longer capable of hosting their services.

With this, the project volunteers also urged its users to backup their data immediately, and to move to another cloud computing service host as soon as possible.

According to Bleeping Computer, the vague notice caused a lot of confusion among the community of Fosshost members who were unaware of the real reason behind the shutdown.

A volunteer, however, is seen commenting on YCombinator Hacker News, saying that their servers will go offline because they can not pay for co-location costs as their CEO Thomas Markey remains unreachable.

Markey is the one responsible in accessing the bank accounts with funds required to continue Fosshost's operations, but the CEO has been missing in action for the past 6 months.

Fosshost is a Community Interest Company formally registered as Companies House, England, and its management is still responsible for filing its annual regulatory paperwork.

Failing to do so will cause Fosshost to be cut off from the companies registers, which will acquire penalties incurred for its directors.

The Cloud Computing Platform Has Been Failing Gradually

Fosshost was a passion project started by Markey in 2020, which quickly evolved into a cloud computing host adapted by the community of open-source users because of its reliability and scalability.

With this, by December 2021, the platform already had as many as 250 open-source projects using Fosshost to develop, build, test, and collect software in one place.

However, the project was deemed to fail as soon as it continued to increase dependence on its CEO, according to Bleeping Computer.

Soon enough, volunteers noticed early warning signs of internal mismanagement emerging, and by August, Fosshost was forced to phase out its AArch64 service before the following month.

The platform announced that their management was under review that same month, which led up to the suspension of its application due to scalability issues in September.

Last month, Fosshost finally reached its lowest point as it met the dead end of its operation of a Chicago node that was no longer accessible, bootable, or recoverable.

On a more positive note, some of Fosshost's former volunteers have begun an alternative called The Radix Project, which is also free of charge according to the announcement by Fosshost itself.