Freedesktop looking for new home for its GitLab instance

Visitors to the freedesktop.org
GitLab instance are currently being greeted with a message noting that
the company who has been hosting it for free for nearly five years, Equinix, has
asked that it be moved (or start being paid for) by the end of April. The
issue
ticket opened by Benjamin Tissoires in order to track the planning of a move is clear that the project is grateful for
the gift:
'First, I'd like to thank Equinix Metal for the years of support they gave us. They were very kind and generous with us and even if it's a shame we have to move out on a short notice, all things come to an end.'

The current cost for the services, much of which is for 50TB of bandwidth data transfer
per month and a half-dozen beefy servers for running continuous-integration
(CI) jobs, comes to around $24,000 per month. Tissoires believes that the
project should start paying for service somewhere, in order to avoid
upheaval of this sort, sometimes on short or no notice. 'I personally
think we better have fd.o pay for its own servers, and then have sponsors
chip in. This way, when a sponsor goes away, it's technically much simpler
to just replace the money than change datacenter.' Various options are
being discussed there, but any move is likely to disrupt normal services
for a week or more.