Thought I´d give a little update on the last post.

I am contemplating moving Kanji Koohii to a fully self-managed server. To be fair the shared hosting at HostGator is pretty decent, but it has occasional issues like recently the Php sessions are not working properly which causes login issues (do check the "Remember me" option for now).

It's also something interesting for me to learn. In theory the response time of the server on a VPS will be more stable.

I tried first with managed VPS on Cloudways and didn't like it. Next I tried Digital Ocean and my experience was pretty bad: dashboard wasn't working at all. Couldn't create a "droplet". Then I moved to Linode and it's great! The dashboard on Linode (Akamai) is super clear and easy to use.

I created a 2vCPU 4GB Linode, which should comfortable run Kanji Koohii. Some years ago I would never have tried this because it felt overwhelming but now with ChatGPT and Gemini I'm a lot more confident. I created a full checklist of all the steps to go through like basic security, enabling Ubuntu Pro, firewall, virtual hosts, SSL etc.

I picked a datacenter on the US West Coast (Los Angeles). I did some basic ping tests and in theory it should give the best compromise for US and Japan which are the top two countries for Kanji Koohii users. So compared to current server in central US the ping for Japan should be a little better like ~150 ms, should be lower for US. For EU it should be about the same than it is now anywhere from 200-350ms. If I picked a datacenter in Frankfurt for example of course EU users would have a very low ping, but US and Japan would be worse.

Right now I setup all the basic security stuff including SSH, firewall, changing the default ports, etc. Now I am learning about setting up the SSL certificates for HTTPS.

Next I will set up the database. It will run on mariadb instead of MySQL.

So far, for the nerd in me at least, it's pretty exciting. Finally I can install useful tools like fzf (fuzzy search), mc (Midnight Commander) etc.

For monitoring I think I will use Uptime Robot and maybe Netdata, so I can have health checks on a mobile app and be alerted if the site goes down.

I will publish the full checklist of all the steps I took to set up the server so anyone experienced can review it and give me some tips if I forgot something!