Hello everyone
This is a hard announcement to make. For years now CSMM has been hosted for free. However, CSMM has grown so much that this is no longer maintainable. You may have noticed over the past few months that there have not been many new features added to CSMM. This is because practically all of my dev time is taken up with putting out fires and making performance improvements.
However, please do not fear. CSMM is still (and always will be) free to use, but usage of my servers will be a perk reserved for donators. Installing CSMM on your own hardware has never been easier. We have extended the installation documentation (https://docs.csmm.app/en/CSMM/self-host/installation.html) to include a Docker installation option and a one-click deployment on Digital Ocean. Running CSMM on your own server has several benefits, notably that performance will skyrocket, you will be able to use location and inventory tracking (currently a donator-only perk) and you will have much more control over and insight into the system.
If you start hosting CSMM on your own server and would like to import data, please create a ticket and I will give you a JSON export that you can import into your private instance.
Concisely, here's what is changing:
* All the public instances (EU, US and AU) are becoming donator-only starting tomorrow.
* At the beginning of February, all free servers will be removed from these instances.
* CSMM is still (and always will be) open-source and free for anyone to use without limitations.
* We will continue to provide support for self-hosted CSMM installs. Support for general Linux issues will be best-effort as it is an open-source project with limited resources. We appreciate any and all help the community can provide for this.