Good morning dear Ubuntu Touch as well as uAdBlocker users,
as some of you may have noticed, currently no updates work for uAdBlock or a reinstallation, because no lists are provided.
I have currently paused the server and would like to briefly put down the reasons here. I took over the development from Mario a few years ago and put a lot of time and love into it.
The app includes not only what runs on your phones, but also the backend. This runs on my server. Currently we have 13 lists, which in all possible combinations comes to a total file size of almost 400 GB.
The server currently updated and rebuilt the lists every Sunday night for more than 7 hours. All lists are also scanned for duplicate entries and removed, so you don't have to download such a large file when setting up the app. The largest list (all 13 together) was still about 100 MB at the end.
Unfortunately, with the size of the lists also the requirements on the servers grew, here are the stats of the current server:
- CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6140 / 6230 (6 cores dedicated)
- 32GB Ram
- 960 GB SSD disk
The costs for the server and the domain are 25 Euro per month. Unfortunately, this is not all, the servers are exposed to aggressive attacks 5 to 7 times a month on average. Of course I have taken security measures, but currently I have to put 5 - 7 hours of work into the server per month.
Actually, once on the server also ran private services from me, such as a mail server or Nextcloud, that I've taken down everything, so that uAdBlock really has as much power as it needs available.
Unfortunately, I currently don't have time to carry this effort in time and cost anymore. I tried many ways like Github and Gitlab to host the lists, but here the limit is only 10 GB, so that wasn't a solution either. Also came over donations regrettably almost no support to min. the costs to carry, so my donations amount currently to 0.62 € per month.
I am very happy about the donations and the development is fun for me, but unfortunately I don't have the time, besides my job and family with 3 children, to maintain a server for 10 hours a month and then also to develop the app further.
I don't know if I will shut down the project forever, but currently it is not sustainable for me. Especially the costs.
I hope this is understandable here.
Someone else is welcome to take over the project, and I would of course also provide the backend on the server.