Under the Hood: How This Network Is Hosted

A few members asked what actually runs this place, so here's the behind-the-scenes tour. No secrets, just a fairly boring setup, which is exactly how I like it.

The basics

• One virtual server with 8 GB of RAM, running UNA on PHP with MariaDB and nginx.
• Uploaded files (photos, covers, attachments) live in separate object storage, so the server's disk never fills up with holiday photos.
• The mobile app talks to the same UNA install through its API. There's no second backend to keep in sync.

Backups

The database is dumped every night and copied to a different provider in a different country. Once a month I restore a backup onto a scratch server and click around to make sure it works. The first time I did this, it didn't. Better to find that out on a quiet Sunday than during an outage.

Monitoring

A small uptime checker pings the site every minute and messages me if it goes down. Every Monday I also get a report with disk usage, slow queries and error counts. Most weeks it's dull. Dull is good.

What I'd change

We're getting close to outgrowing a single server, mostly because of image processing at busy times. The plan for later this year is a bigger machine and a proper staging copy, so I can stop testing things in production. I'll write it up when it happens.

If you self-host your own community and want to compare setups, come and say hello in the Self-Hosting Club.