But this is not without risk; the reason that ChessUSA involved CloudFlare (or locked out entire countries by IP) was as protection against crashes suspected to be the result of DDoS attacks. We yet have to prove that in our new setup we can stave off or survive such attacks. And if initially not, try to harden our defenses. Now that we have access to the server logs, it should be possible to do post-mortem analysis of any crashes we might suffer, and learn from it how to arm ourselves against the events that caused the crash.
Anyway, let me share some info on where we are now. We are running on a VPS rented from strato.nl, but I think Strato is really a German company, and the actual server might be in Germany. The specs of the VPS (Linux VC4-8) are:
* 4 virtual CPUs (= hyper threads)
* 8 GB RAM
* 300 GB NVMe (SSD)
* up to 1Gbit/s bandwidth
Operating system is Ubuntu 22.04, on which we run an Apache 2 server, MariaDB database, PHP and phpBB 3.3.11.
Since the entire TalkChess database is only about 2.2GB, it can be entirely and permanently cached in RAM. There is also room for many backups in the permanent storage.
Chess diagrams through fen tags and a game viewer through pgn tags are implemented client-side, through JavaScript programs that are now hosted on our own server. These programs would normally reside in the cache of your browser, and scan every forum page you view for the occurrence of such tags, and replace their content with the requested graphics.
The subscription includes a single SSL certificate, which we can use to make the talkchess.com domain https rather than http. We still have to install that, and for the time being we have installed a 'self-signed' certificate as placeholder.
