Welcome to StormBit!

First and foremost, StormBit is an IRC network. That means we host chatrooms for individuals and communities on our international network of servers.

Whether you’re an individual, or represent an internet community, we believe we can fulfil your hosting needs and indeed if you take the time to get in touch with us, you’ll find us very flexible in our ability to support the growth of communities.

“Hands-off” approach to moderation

We don’t fuss around with menial details such as who you are and what you are doing - our philosophy is such that so long as you aren’t abusing the service we provide, typically by attacking or harassing other users or by violating regional laws with which we comply, we will not interfere with you unless you request some kind of assistance.

For further clarification, be sure to read our policies, or ask a member of staff.

Where we come from

Originally founded as a short-lived albeit briefly successful forum community, we first opened our doors as an IRC network in early 2011 and have been expanding ever since.

It’s been a shaky road since then, we’ve had our fair share of ups and downs and have both lost and gained some excellent members of staff.

In 2011, and for the bulk of 2012, we maintained a Janus link with the Tsukihime and the ArchivesMC IRC networks, but have since discontinued the use of this software out of a concern for the vulnerabilities it presented and the general political complications of cross-network channels subject to conflicting policies.

Our team brings together much technical experience, pooling expertise across many different fields ranging from networking to plain old system operation. We have partners who take care of some services (like DNS, cheers Rage4!), but what we do, we do well.

Some Technical Details

We openly embrace many open-source technologies in order to offer what we feel is the best service available. Amongst these are:

• The Linux kernel. Nearly every system we own or maintain runs on the Linux kernel and much of our work is only made possible by its sheer flexibility.
• Debian 7. Offering rock-solid stability, and powerful easy-to-use command-line tools, Debian has become something of a de-facto standard for the majority of linux-based servers. Nearly every system in our “fleet” runs some flavour of Debian - Indeed we make extensive use of Debian’s package management and maintain our own repository to deploy software updates quickly and efficiently.
• Ubuntu Server. For the rest, for systems where both stability and bleeding-edge software is required, there is little choice for a production server than Ubuntu. It just works. Like Debian, but with newer stuff, and yet still compatible with its packages. speaks for itself. Everything is a module, enabling networks to scale up and cherrypick the features they want to offer. In our case the unique linking capabilities of InspIRCd make it the perfect choice, with a plethora of nifty security features to boot.
• Atheme 7. There’s much to say about this very unique IRC services package. It’s highly scalable, very modular, and offers more functionality than you will ever need right out of the box. Everything about it, makes sense, and the learning curve is consequently fairly shallow considering its differences to other packages such as Anope.
• Docker. In the new age of cloud computing, virtualisation software has been the key to success. We found a very elegant solution to our needs to rapidly deploy software and better distribute our resources and hardware in the form of Docker and its containers. Based on LXC, this works a treat with LTS releases of Ubuntu.