The second point to be cleared is the following statement by ILOVECANADA (aka Base).
- “Where do you think all the donations are going? To our 20 different overpriced VPSs?”
This claim is entirely false and over dramatic. As of the 12th of October 2025, ATL has never had more than 10 VPS’s at once. For the longest time, we only had one dedicated server and 3 VPS each with specialist purposes. After the recent DDoS attacks in August 2025, we decided it was best to rebuild our infrastructure with a focus on separation of concerns and isolation of each individual group of services to maximise integrity, availability and reliability with an entirely new approach to security, networking and administration. You can learn more about our infrastructure changes on our blog post
here.
For further transparency, all VPS’s are rented from Hetzner Cloud and nearly all VPS are at the minimum or second minimum tiered plan in terms of billing and are strictly only scaled to have the resources they need to minimise the cost per month. As it currently stands we have 10 machines, with one in the process of being deprecated, they are listed below with a short summary of its purpose. As of the 12th of October 2025, we have the following machines, and as per the financial statements above it costs $154.44 a month with the “mothership” being the largest expense. Once we deprecate the “mothership” we expect expenses to drop to roughly $90 a month.
- Dedicated VPS (aka “Mothership”), this server is in the process of being deprecated by EOY. It only hosts mail.atl.tools and is used for high traffic operations with our ISO archive project.
- atl-dev-tux, this is a low resource VPS in the ashburn area solely running our self-hosted in house discord bot “Tux”. It is the only server in that region to improve latency to Discord’s API.
- atl-network-bastion, this is another low resource VPS which serves as a secure gateway for our SSH access to our machines, this was a part of our DDoS response to ensure maximum availability.
- atl-tools, this machine hosts our set of self-hosted tools from atl.tools, excluding mail. We hope to expand the offered services on this machine in the coming months and we welcome suggestions.
- atl-dev, this machine hosts some of our inhouse projects such as our stats backend for stats.atl.dev and our eventual goal is to use it to provide a shared resource for hosting community run projects.
- atl-services, this machine hosts essential infrastructure such as are in progress metrics stack as well as other discord bots such as TuxGPT and our personal shortlink system atl.sh
- atl-chat, this machine is being used to host our IRC and XMPP bridges and servers which are in active development, you can see more progress on GitHub: XMPP & IRC
- atl-wiki, this machine hosts our wiki, atl.wiki, along with all the supplementary services such as Valkey, its Discord bot and OAUTH backend.
- atl-wiki-db, to separate concerns and maximise availability and integrity the wiki’s database is run on a separate machine, this machine is low resource due to its minimal overhead.
- atl-sandbox, a low resource VPS which is used as a testing environment for all our projects before we bring them live.
We hope in the future we can share more about our infrastructure to the community to improve our transparency behind it. We always try our best to minimise expenses but in our aims of ensuring the maximum integrity and availability of our resources