2024

Introducing Hansel and Gretel

The nodes in our first, primary datacenter (in Germany), have been classed as elves (contended), hobbits, and rangers (dedicated). We maintain enough hardware such that we can tolerate the loss of any one node type, and "fit" all the tenant workloads on the others.

Until now, this has meant maintaining enough capacity for a spare elf, hobbit, and ranger. Since we're close to introducing halfling (50% shared) and nazgul (100% dedicated) nodes, and we don't want to have to maintain a whole 5 extra nodes for spare capacity, we're migrating the .com cluster to 2 new node classes...

Tiered discounts on supplemental apps for bundle subscribers

Get your discounted apps!

In Aug, we standardized pricing across our non-bundled products at $9/month for simple apps, and $19/month for complex apps. This has enabled self-service "app-hopping" , since the store will allow the exchange of one app, for another equally priced app, without charge.

We've also explained in the FAQ that even "low-touch" apps incur a support / development / time and attention cost, which is why they're priced the way they are.

Recent feedback touched on the increased cost of adding supplemental apps, for "nice-to-haves" like custom domains, storage mounts, etc, with some respondents avoiding experimenting with these as a result.

We've now added the functionality to the store to offer bundled subscribers discounted pricing on additional apps, as detailed below..

US DC ready for (BETA) migrations

Launch your Elf-spedition!

ElfHosted's default datacenter is located in the EU, which may not result in the best performance for users in other parts of the world.

We're expanding to other regions, and this guide will show you how to migrate your ElfHosted services between regions...

After several weeks of alpha-testing, our US-based datacenter is ready for more beta-testers!

To see whether you're a candidate for relocation, check your speed at here, and if a migration would be favorable, review the detailed instructions in this guide

Store theme updates

One of the feedback items from our recent survey was that the store was relatively hard to use / navigate. So we're working through a theming / structure updated, which in the short term, may have made it harder to navigate! :man_facepalming

If you notice anything out-of-place in the store, feel free to drop a note into the Discord thread established specifically for this purpose!

Elf-Disclosure for Aug 2024 released

In case you missed it, our Elf-Disclosure report for Aug 2024 was published 2 weeks ago, full of juicy stats, and notably the calculation that we covered our cash expenses in Aug!

Today's scoreboard

Metric	Numberz	Delta
🧝 Total subscribers	254	+74
🐬 Tenant pods	3242	+877
🐛 Bugz squished	-	-
🕹️ New toyz	1	-

Summary

Thanks for geeking out with us, and please share these posts with related geeks! Type /review into any Discord channel to share your experience - this helps us to attract mooar elves!

Riven's Frontend Fixed (Library view)

Fantastic Frontend

We've been using Riven since before the frontend was working nicely, so we've all assumed that the 500 errors on the "Library" view of the frontend was normal, indicating a work in progress.

It turns out, this has been fixed for a while, but we were presenting the database parameters to the frontend in the wrong syntax - now that the syntax is fixed, your Riven frontend's library tab should look more like this:

Thanks to @zombie in Discord, we've unearthed another possible bug...

PlexTraktSync comes to ElfTerm

With the increasing stability / popularity of Riven, we're seeing users regularly asking "how can I switch from plex_debrid to Riven, keeping my Plex library?"

There's no "import" option in Riven, but now we have the next-best thing - using PlexTraktSync within ElfTerm, you can:

• "sync" your Plex library with Trakt,
• remove your old plex_debrid-managed libraries, and then
• start "from scratch" with Riven, letting it sync back your library content from Trakt!

Read on for more...

Plex_debrid gets Zilean support, fixes

Plex_debrid's GitHub repository has been stale since Dec 2023, and achived since May 2024. Our attempts to contact the developer to offer stewardship of the project have been unfruitful thus far.

We've had our own fork of the plex_debrid repo for a while, to manage a few fixes (like Trakt auth), but @ron has taken it to a whole new level by adding Zilean support, and a parametized watchlist search interval (original is hard-coded to 30m).

I announced our repo on Reddit today, with the intention of attracting more users and hopefully more PRs, so that we can continue to improve upon and support plex_debrid for ElfHosted users.

To activate Zilean support in plex_debrid, add Zilean as a scraper source at Options/Settings/Scraper Settings/Sources - our internal Zilean instance is addressed at http://zilean.zilean:8181.

To adjust your search-my-watchlist interval, change Options/Settings/UI Settings/Watchlist loop interval (sec) accordingly.

Riven Comet support, duplicates fixed

Riven 0.8.0 shipped yesterday, but without Comet support due to a bug. This is now resolved, so your Riven should start searching the ElfHosted Comet database from tonight's rollout.

Also, duplicate folders will no longer cause Riven to crash-and-burn, but just to log an error and continue on its way

Today's scoreboard

Metric	Numberz	Delta
🧝 Total subscribers	327	-2
👾 Zurg mounts:	127	-
⛰ Riven pods:	50	+2
🐬 Tenant pods	2651	-18
🧑🏻‍🌾 Hobbits	29	+2
🤠 Rangers	19	-
🦸 Elf-vengers	8	-
🐛 Bugz squished	1	-
🕹️ New toyz	1	-

Summary

Thanks for geeking out with us, and please share these posts with related geeks! Type /review into any Discord channel to share your experience - this helps us to attract mooar elves!

Riven 0.8.0 Released

Tonight saw the end of the famous Riven "pickle dance", as our favorite .pkl file was abandoned for a "real" database (SQLite, in our case), as part of the big v0.8.0 release!

Riven 0.8.0's changes include:

• Plex watchlists work again
• Anime show fixes
• Settings migrations
• RealDebrid API rate-limit fixes
• AllDebrid support
• TorBox support
• Comet support
• Lots more!

Dashboard backgrounds are back!

Tonight's user-facing change update is primarily UI polish - we've got the first instance of Zurg/Riven stats being reported on your dashboard, and the random background wallpapers are back! (We assumed these to be lost in the #fluxpocalypse, but it turns out unsplash just turned off their HTTP-based endpoint we were using to download them!)

Upon tonight's update, you'll end up with 2 random backgrounds on your apps dashboard, which may / may not look good. Think of these as placeholders - you can replace them with anything you like, provided you save your replacements into config/homer/backgrounds, and then restart homer with elfbot restart homer

Trials are gone, Elf-ferrals are back!

Trials are gone

Further to the original announcement, it quickly became clear that the 7-day trials were more trouble than they were worth. A trial period prevented users from using their ElfBuckz as part-payment on a subscription, as well as "bundle-hopping" between different subscriptions.

Trials also represented an abuse risk - Wordpress doesn't have a way to prevent a user from trialing, cancelling, and re-trialing to continuously extend a trial indefinitely.

So, no more trials. Instead, we'll offer a 14-day refund based on a conversation - if a user is unhappy with the service, and we can't make them happy, we'll refund the unused portion of their subscription, within the first 14 days.

Oh, and the other issue with trials was that they made the referral process exploitable, so...

Referrals are back!

With the transition to monthly billing, and the removal of trials, it's now safe to re-instate the Elf-erral program!

Here's the deal - every user you refer with your unique referral code gets $5 off their first order, and you get a $5-off coupon! ($10 free ElfBuckz, reborn!)

Storage mounts are free

Everything in the store now falls into one of the 5 product tiers, and I couldn't work out where storage mounts fitted in.

Rather than overcomplicate the product tiers, all storage mounts are now free, with an initial $9 setup fee (both to cover support and to deter abuse).

If you're migrating from an older subscription to a monthly one, drop us a note, we'll refund the setup fee for your storage mounts.

And there's more...

Pricing model changes

When ElfHosted was "born", the idea was to provide "pay-as-you-go" type hosting using a microservices model on "cheap" hardware, leveraging Kubernetes to make the platform resilient. We used ElfBuckz and daily subscriptions to "shoehorn" this model onto the store, and while it worked, it was confusing and hard to manage.

One year later, we're geared heavily towards debrid-focused media apps (we only added real-debrid support in Feb 2024!), and a "core feature" is our friendly Discord community, and our bundles which "just work".

$10 free ElfBuckz, daily subscriptions, and pricing based purely on measured / forecast resource usage no longer "fits", and so the following changes are rolling out..