Migration to af-south-1

19 December 2022

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As of today, mastodon.africa operates entirely within the borders of South Africa - via the AWS Cape Town (af-south-1) region.

When the instance was initially launched, it was provisioned on a Hetzner server (in Germany) to get up and running quickly. The intention was to eventually transfer it into South African hosting, which has now been accomplished:

• The primary EC2 server now runs out of af-south-1
• Media is saved directly to an S3 bucket domiciled in af-south-1
• AWS CloudFlare provides a CDN distribution for better performance
• AWS Route53 provides DNS hosting for the mastodon.africa domain
• The internal PostgreSQL database is backed up daily to a secure S3 bucket

On the technical side, most of the work has been completed. All that remains:

• Upgrading the instance to the latest version of Mastodon
• Publishing the mission, vision, code of conduct and Terms pages
• Opening up registration to the wider public

Applications for new accounts are already open, though - if you’re interested in signing up, you can do so at https://mastodon.africa/.