luckily this can only happen once every couple years ;-;

Two things, first, for EU players, please use the anti-DDoS servers for official/casted matches and TF2Center games.

Second, for NA players, our long term sponsor Tragicservers (<3) is changing their infrastructure, so while that's happening we're down on capacity in NA. Once the move is completed I'll have to try and integrate their new gameserver control panel with na.serveme.tf.

This might prove to be difficult, even though I have used their new control panel software succesfully before (TCAdmin at Simrai), that was thanks to the exceptional access granted to me by SimRai, because TCAdmin at the time didn't allow you to restart servers (through an API) without extensive administrator privileges.
So bear with us while we wait for this move to be finished.

We're still waiting for our tragicservers to come back, so in the meantime we're adding some new servers and locations to na.serveme.tf to have some more options and capacity. Also, one of our machines from our Kansas location is having more and more issues, so we're looking to phase that one out soon.

First of all, 8 new gameservers in Chicago (NFOservers), these are live right now. We'll also be adding 8 more Chicago servers from a different company/datacenter soon. That server is paid for, but out of stock at the moment.

Also live now from a different datacenter/company in Kansas City, 16 gameservers running on a 12-core machine, a bit like Kroket/BolusBrigade in EU.

shoutout new chicago servers

Yeah, it took a while, but we added a second Chicago-based machine providing 8 gameservers in addition to the 8 NFO-Chicago gameservers. Due to tragicservers going away we had to get a bunch of extra capacity in NA on short notice. This has resulted in having too many machines right now (compared to the amount of money coming in from premium), so we're planning to get rid of the Dallas and North Carolina locations as these are the most expensive, and the least popular we think. Let us know here or on Discord if you disagree.

This would leave NA with these locations/servers:
Kansas City 1: 4 gameservers
Kansas City 2: 20 gameservers
Chicago (NFO): 8 gameservers
Chicago 2: 8 gameservers
Los Angeles: 8 gameservers

In EU we had to cope with a price hike for one of the datacenters we use (i3d), but we did that by getting a better deal on the servers in France. So you might've noticed 2 new French DDoS-protected machines (BaguetteBrigade/CroissantBrigade) that are taking the place of the 2 machines we had before.
We're also looking to retire the aging FakkelBrigade machine (hosting EU serveme.tf and some gameservers) after almost 8 years of service and replacing it with a modern 6-core machine.

The EU serveme.tf site is now hosted on a shiny new machine, the site might feel a little faster :)

Donations have been solid for NA, so we're looking to maintain the North Carolina machine in addition to the locations from my previous post.

Lots of DDoSes recently in NA, so we're trying to get DDoS mitigation on more machines. A total waste of my time and budget for this project, but unfortunately it's necessary once more.

Like in the EU, the NA servers with Anti-DDoS are now marked, please use these for your casted matches. A total of 24 servers with DDoS protection are available right now (LA and Chicago), we're looking to add a central location soon, probably Dallas.

The DDoS protected added to 8 of the Chicago servers did not work correctly during peak hours, causing packet loss. It's been disabled.
A similar anti-DDoS system added to the Dallas servers appears to have functioned without problems, so that's staying enabled for now.

anyone who ddoses a tf2 server has baby dick

Still looking for better DDoS protection in NA, suggestions welcome, let me know here or add me on steam. NFOservers anti-DDoS takes a couple of minuts to kick in, which is too long in my opinion.

Also offering a reward for information that will lead to the identity of the DDoSer of NA matches.

Does the CS one not exist anymore? :(

No, sorry. The CSGO version had basically no donations and very few players, so I couldn't justify keeping it running for free while it ate into capacity for TF2.

EU serveme.tf passed the 1 million reservations mark last month, while NA passed the 300k mark. Meanwhile human malware is causing a spike in usage in both NA and EU, basically since March when the lockdowns began. Today we peaked at 673 players, I can't remember ever seeing that many concurrent players.

This is causing some strain on the system but we're OK for now and can easily scale up if needed. Currently just operating at higher capacity than normal. Please let us know on Discord if you experience a laggy server (for all players) or if you have premium and can't get a server.

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_gx4jYpxoOl.png

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_lW5KCIpQAH.png

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_1TmhAp5GJ9.png

All this extra activivity is driving more people to buy premium, which is great, but it also causes us to overshoot our monthly goal. The monthly goal covers the server costs (we're a non-profit), and we've used the overshoot of March to cover some losses for having to rent extra NA servers and tools due to DDoSes.

For April, it looks like we'll overshoot the donation target again, by a large margin (it's April 9 and EU is already at 109%). We might have to use this to get some extra servers, but we'll donate the excess to a good cause, currently considering Doctors Without Borders as the recipient, but we're also considering contributing to some TF2 projects like demos.tf and whitelist.tf. If you have better ideas or strong opinions, let us know here or on Discord.

Due to continued DDoS-ing we're adding some extra servers in NA. Starting with 2 more Chicago servers (online now) and 8 new Dallas-based servers (online this weekend now).

With the RGL season active and more people at home due to COVID, the NA system is very full every night. We've also had to seriously look at the real server cost for NA, since dedicated servers are quite a bit more expensive in NA (I was paying the overrun myself, since serveme.tf is a non-profit by design).
That means I've had to raise the monthly goal in NA to cover the costs. That increased goal was already mostly being met, but I've also cut some costs by switching to cheaper dedicated servers, of equal or better specifications.

On the plus side, NA regularly has more active players than EU, so we've increased the amount of NA servers to 101. Depending on demand, COVID, and how the seasons go we will adjust the amount in the months ahead.

https://i.imgur.com/RnS4xly.png

Some services updates and an apology to NA players:

After some required security and dependency updates to the serveme project, a critical component of the NA site was not functioning correctly. This caused reservations not to start, making the service unusable on a normally busy night, which sucks.
As an apology, everyone with premium in NA has received a premium code for a free month. You can choose to use this free month for yourself, or give it away. Use the settings page to claim the code or give it away to a friend.

Service updates:
We've added more DDoS-protected servers in NA, and removed some servers that did not have DDoS protection. Most servers have at least some form of DDoS protection now.
In EU we've added 16 extra gameserver (DusselBrigade) in the same datacenter as the current WilhelmBrigade servers. The new machine is faster and cheaper, so WilhelmBrigade will be phased out at contract end.

Well....for the first time in 20 years of hosting gameservers, one actually burned to a crisp xD

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/1369504527544705025

RIP CroissantBrigade

Update: Welcome PhoenixBrigade, 10 gameservers to replace the ones that are now a puddle of molten metal.

tl;dr Trialing SDR-based servers (Valve's "VPN"), available now in EU and NA, give them a go

Over the past 6 months there has been a large increase in the amount, size and complexity of DDoS attacks. Some of the DDoS protection offered by our providers proved to be ineffective, with no fix in sight.
In EU, only the servers hosted by OVH proved resilient, while in NA, only the servers hosted by NFO proved sufficiently protected against most attacks.

For EU we were able to add a second location (Germany, PetraBrigade) with OVH DDoS protection, since not everyone has great routing to France. In NA we would have liked to have NFO Dallas as a reliable DDoS-protected location in addition to NFO Chicago. Unfortunately their anti-DDoS capabilities in Dallas proved insufficient.
Thanks to community member and server hoster Rob (Rob#9019), we were able to add two very powerful Dallas-based servers with anti-DDoS (DAL3+DAL4).

In addition to these new DDoS protected servers we're also trialing a new kind of server. A couple of weeks ago, Valve added SDR support to TF2. SDR is kind of like a VPN for gaming traffic, already used to keep DOTA and CS:GO servers safe from DDoS.
Both the server and players get private IPs, which is good for your privacy and good for keeping the real IP of the server a secret. Apart from privacy and DDoS protection, SDR can also help with routing, especially over longer distances, so it can even improve your ping in some cases.

Starting today we're trialing SDR in EU and NA. In EU, we've added a Dutch machine in a new location, and the servers on that machine are only reachable through SDR.
In NA, we've added a machine located in Dallas, also at a new datacenter, again only reachable through SDR.

What this means for you:
You make a reservation for these servers just like normal, SDR servers are clearly named. After making the reservation you get a preliminary IP and port. These can still change if the server has to receive a full reboot before your reservation starts (e.g. a TF2 update), so if you can't connect, check back once your reservation has fully launched for the final IP and port. This can take about a minute longer than you're used to.

The IP and port for an SDR is in the 169.254.xxx.xxx range. Normally this is a private IP range, but your TF2 takes care of connecting to this "fake" ip properly. In addition to the server having this fake IP, you as a player also get a fake IP in this same range. So as a server hoster, we never get to see your real IP, which is a nice privacy bonus.

Worked on some site updates....

First and foremost, RCON through the site (also shows a live log of what's happening on the server):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcZyXEdZ43k

Second, some more dynamic content. Here's a little video showing the new reservation page that live updates its info.

This also shows off the new status messages at the bottom of the page. There's now also an indicator to show your server is updating if it was outdated due to a TF2 server update and the SDR connect info refreshes automatically as soon as it's ready.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji3HDxf1rs0

Holy cow, that's amazing. Kinda kills my idea, but I may have some more up my sleeve.

This basically means that serveme is a mirror of nfo or tragic, and that's great.

Yeah your post gave me the motivation to take another swing at this. :)

Made some more updates on the web rcon stuff. Added auto complete for some common commands, e.g. execing league configs, changing map, kicking players.
Also added a !webrcon command to the gameservers, which opens the web rcon interface for your reservation. You can see both in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zntcATa_TY

You're doing Gods work Arie

I think Russians deserve a better explanation than what was posted on the site. People are not happy with the decision of not allowing Russians to use the site. I don't think it's that big of a deal but considering to ban them from serveme servers completely when the war arbitrarily gets worse is an awful decision. You would deal a heavy blow to an already dying competitive scene. Serveme has a monopoly in European tf2 (unlike US) so it should be conscious of that. Banning a player needs to be done very sensibly and heavily scrutinised. Thu4der ban was ok. Nobody will ever miss him. Yet, the Russian ban goes against being a platform and honestly just builds more tension while you cannot influence politics in any meaningful way so the only reason to do it would be because of a principle. Serveme has done an amazing job so far so I hope this is just a 1 time thing.

https://ebolo.s-ul.eu/yZSZOcl2.png

I couldn't find anything about the ban, did they actually just IP ban all of russia? That's so insanely stupid I hope there's something else happening? Does serveme think Putin and the Russian oligarchs reserve a tf2 server after planning out the invasion of sovereign nations?

Would have been nice to have asked before sharing part of our private conversation. Especially since you wanted a person invading and disturbing matches banned (thanks for that report though).

I'll try to explain better, because I agree the Russian players deserve that much.

I do try to let serveme.tf be just a platform and let it stay out of politics as much as possible, whether those of real life or TF2 leagues. Which is why serveme.tf doesn't automatically copy league bans for example. Not for people saying bad words in RGL, being toxic or even cheating, that's between you and the league.
It's why for the first 9 years of operation we didn't have a ban list, and now we only have a tiny (and public) ban list consisting of basically DDoSers and match invaders. That specific match invader is already unbanned as well after a talk I had with them, as to not prevent them from playing competitive TF2 after a dumb mistake. (hoping he will behave now ;) )

The current situation with the Russian player base troubles me a lot. I'm extremely pleased with the amount of Russian and eastern european players that have found a cheap home for servers in serveme.tf over the years. Especially with the economic conditions and those with a brutal exchange rate (even more so now).

But with what's happening now I'm left with only poor choices. Serveme.tf is a non-profit, funded by the community and with a small amount of free servers made possible by paying members. These free servers allow players with little money or a terrible exchange rate to play comp tf2 on their own servers and rules. Switching to a fully paid model would screw over these people (e.g. Turks) and lock out Russians completely from making reservations. Keeping the non-profit model while being unable to accept payments from the largest base of "free" users seems unfair to me for those that do pay.
And expecting Russians to evade sanctions on their end, to pay me, a European, who has to evade sanctions on their end to receive payment is not something I'm willing to deal with or ask of them.

So this is the shitty compromise I've ended up with. Russians (excluding those who already had premium), can no longer use the website and make reservations. But they can play on the servers, they can ask a Euro or other non-Russian friend to make a reservation for them. Premium users can make multiple reservations for their friends as well, within reason of course.

Obviously not the reason for the ban, no. But consider this: Is there a single thing that would fix the problem? And if there's no single thing that would fix everything, should we do no single thing?
UEFA banning Russian clubs won't change anything. FIFA banning the Russian team won't change anything. The IOC banning Russian athletes won't change anything. Banning Russian airplanes won't change anything. What about all of these and more?

Any action to make the average Russian person question why this or any sanction is happening is a good idea. People need to protest en masse and question the inhuman things their government is doing, when people start to have their comforts taken away maybe then they'll start to stop ignoring things that are going on. From the way the economy looks at the moment not being able to play on some TF2 servers will be the least of their worries :-(.

You fucking saying it like the Russians havent been protesting Putin's regime for years and years now, just to meet the same failure result

Congratulations on your new account and first post here comrade, a steam account that hasn't played on any of my servers in the last 10 years at least, if ever.
Be safe, and peace be with you, the Russian people deserve it.

Your servers and my steam account have nothing to do with what I just said