Cloud Hosted Web Server

The aim of the project was to deploy a secure web server using a cloud hosting provider based in Switzerland.

Functional requirements:

• The server will host an HTML/JavaScript application (the Ether Fund Raiser DApp)
• It will be accessed via its own domain name
• It should be secure, serving pages via HTTPS by default
• Hardware (CPU, Disk Space, Memory, etc.) and Bandwidth usage should be charged for on an as-used basis, with per second billing
• The server would require limited storage capacity and no database as all transactions would be recorded on the Ethereum blockchain
• The server should be hosted in Switzerland

Technical overview:

• The server is cloud hosted through Exoscale from their Data Centre in Geneva, Switzerland
• The server hardware is based on the Exoscale Micro Package and initially uses 512MB RAM, 1 x 2GHz CPU and 10GB disk space, running the Linux Ubuntu operating system
• The domain name was obtained through namecheap
• The web server is hosted using the express Node.js npm module running in HTTPS mode
• The HTTPS certificates were provided from LetsEncrypt using certbot
• The web server is “kept alive” using the pm2 Node.js npm module

(Image above by Pete Linforth from Pixabay)