← Back to all posts

Help Us Secure New Server Hardware for Free-DC

Posted by Skillz — June 12, 2026 at 5:33 PM (edited June 12, 2026 at 5:34 PM)

Help Us Secure New Server Hardware for Free-DC

Hey everyone,

I've got an opportunity to make a big upgrade to how Free-DC runs, and I wanted to bring it to the community to see if anyone would like to chip in.

I'm looking at purchasing a Dell PowerEdge R740xd to replace our current web server. This is proper enterprise hardware, and it would consolidate everything onto one solid, reliable machine. Here's the build:

  • Chassis: Dell PowerEdge R740xd (2U, 24-bay 2.5")
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6148 — 40 cores total
  • Memory: 384 GB DDR4
  • Storage: 24x 240GB SSD (~5.76 TB), plus a BOSS dual-M.2 card for the OS boot drives
  • Networking: Dual 10GbE + dual 1GbE
  • Management: iDRAC9 for full remote control
  • Power: Redundant 750W Platinum PSUs

Total: $4,814.60

Why this matters

This isn't just a "bigger box" purchase — it actually saves money and makes the site more secure going forward:

It cuts our monthly costs. Right now I run two separate servers — one for development/testing and one for production. With a machine this capable, I can run both on a single physical server using a Proxmox/VM setup, with the dev and production environments fully isolated from each other. That eliminates roughly $45/month in hosting that we won't need anymore.

Better bot protection. The new server comes with a block of 5 IP addresses instead of the single IP we have now. If you've been following along, you know we fight a constant battle against bot traffic and scrapers hammering the sites. Having multiple IPs gives me a lot more flexibility to route, isolate, and filter that junk traffic — including building a proper challenge layer in front of the web server to weed out bots before they ever touch the site.

More headroom for the community. More cores, more RAM, and fast enterprise storage mean the stats site stays fast and responsive even as we keep adding features.

How you can help

If you'd like to help make this happen, donations of any size go a long way toward securing the hardware. As always, every cost and every donation is tracked transparently on the donation page so you can see exactly where the money goes.

https://free-dc.org/donations

And to be clear — there's no pressure at all. Free-DC keeps running regardless. But if you've gotten value out of the stats over the years and want to help push it forward, this is a great way to do it.

Thanks as always for being part of this community. It's the reason any of this is worth doing.

— Skillz