It is with a heavy heart that we announce DanBot Hosting will be ceasing all operations by the end of April 2026.
This has not been an easy decision. We have been around since 2015, and we never imagined writing a post like this. What follows is a transparent account of the pressures that have made continuing operations untenable.
Infrastructure Costs and the Global Memory Shortage
The most immediate pressure is hardware cost.
Server DRAM pricing has increased approximately 172% over the course of 2025. According to TrendForce's February 2026 forecast, contract prices for server memory are projected to rise a further 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026 alone, the largest single-quarter increase on record. The root cause is well-documented: AI data centres are consuming an estimated 20% of global DRAM wafer capacity in 2026, with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all redirecting cleanroom output toward higher-margin HBM for AI accelerators. Conventional server memory has been squeezed out. New fabrication capacity from Micron's Japan facility will not come online until late 2028 at the earliest.
For a hosting provider of our scale, the compounding effect of these price increases has been severe. We already charge insanely cheap rates, but this has placed our balance sheet even further into the red. We cannot absorb what is projected for the remainder of the year.
Regulatory Compliance Costs
Alongside infrastructure costs, the regulatory landscape has shifted significantly in ways that disproportionately affect small hosting providers.
UK Online Safety Act. Since the Online Safety Act's age assurance deadline of 25 July 2025, Ofcom has launched investigations into over 90 services and issued multiple fines, including £800,000 to Kick Online Entertainment in February 2026 and £520,000 to 4chan in March 2026. Compliance for platforms accessible to UK users requires implementing what Ofcom defines as "Highly Effective Age Assurance," with approved methods including Open Banking verification, photo ID matching, and facial age estimation. The cost of integrating and maintaining a compliant system is not trivial. Non-compliance carries fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global annual turnover.
California AB 1043. Signed into law in October 2025 and taking effect January 2027, AB 1043 requires every "operating system provider" to collect age bracket data at account setup and expose it via a real-time API to application developers. The definition of "operating system provider" is broad enough to capture Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian, and others are currently in active discussions about what compliance even looks like for a volunteer-maintained project with no account system. MidnightBSD has begun blocking California IP ranges entirely. For us, the compliance requirements intersect in ways that would require significant legal and engineering investment across our stack.
We recognise that neither of these laws was designed with small hosting providers in mind. That does not make the compliance burden any less real.
The Strait of Hormuz
Then there is the situation in the Middle East.
Several servers that were supposed to ship to us are now stuck in transit due to disruption in the region.
Shipping routes have become less predictable, and delivery windows that were measured in days are now measured in weeks.
That delay has affected our expansion plans, hardware replacement schedule, and our ability to improve reliability on timeline.
Additional Factors
We are disclosing these in the interest of full transparency.
Mike leaving DBH: With Mike leaving DBH, what's the purpose of life anymore? DBH was the addiction, the way to lose a grand overnight without any seconds thoughts. The UK version of Las Vegas, dare we say. Why would you leave this life, and instead try to be "fiscally responsible"? You know how many people missed out by being fiscally responsible? Take a look at the US Government, and all the fun they're having.
Theo Browne Incident: Man I don't even know what happened, dude dropped a 40 minute hate speech on hosting providers, servers, Oracle, Vercel, Anthrophic like the hater he is, and Obsidian. Like what'd we do? Oracle is deserved, looking at your Larry Elison. What did Obsidian do to you? AND WHY ARE YOU TAKING IT OUT ON OUR INDUSTRY. Californians are weird. Theo is even weirder. Happy birthday man, I hope both your pillows and Sleep Eight Matresss are warm tonight.
The March 14th incident. Our monitoring systems logged no anomalies. No thresholds were breached. No alerts fired. Nevertheless, on the afternoon of March 14th, our infrastructure experienced what the on-call engineer's incident report describes only as "a general sense of unease." Services remained technically online. We are still not sure what happened. The postmortem document exists but no one has been willing to present it. I'm like 99% sure Audi was behind it. Something about having a German on our team gives me the creeps.
What Happens Next
All services will remain online through April 30th, 2026. We recommend exporting your data and planning your migration accordingly. Further communication will follow via our Discord server and this blog.
We want to sincerely thank every user who has been part of DanBot Hosting over the years. It has meant more than we can adequately express here.
Happy April Fools.
We are not going anywhere. Everything above about RAM prices, the Online Safety Act, AB 1043, and the Strait of Hormuz is entirely real: those are genuinely difficult conditions in the industry right now. The birds, the sentient support ticket, the Oracle invoice, and the rest are not. DanBot Hosting is fine and has no plans to close. Thank you for reading this far.
The DanBot Hosting Team