Running an IRC Network in 2019: Challenges and Opportunities

Today there exist a few benefits for IRC networks that didn’t 20-30 years ago, such as Let’s Encrypt, which makes it very affordable (in fact, free as in beer), for networks to get TLS certificates by an actual Certificate Authority. An IRC bot located on a central hub server controls the Route 53 database. When a server splits away from the network or hits a configurable maximum number of users, the bot automatically removes said server from the Route 53 pool of servers that users can be directed to.

Source: www.darenet.org