Logcheck. It took ages to make sure innocent logs are ignored, but now I get an email as soon as anything non-routine happens on my servers. I get emails with logs from every update, every time I log in, etc. This has given me the most confidence that nothing unexpected is happening on my servers. Of course, one needs to make sure that the firewall is configured well, and that you use ssh keys etc., but logcheck is how I know I’m doing enough.

How do you upload a snapshot?

Basically, as you said. Mount the data somewhere and back up its contents.

I back up snapshots rather than current data, because I don’t want to stop the running containers that read and write from that data. I’d rather avoid the situation where the container is writing data while it’s being backed up. The back up happens shortly after the daily snapshot is made so the difference between current and snapshot data is small.

As others have said, with an incremental filesystem level mechanism, the backup process won’t be too taxing for the CPU. I have ZFS set up which makes this easy and I make hourly snapshots using sanoid which also get sent to another mirrored pair of connected drives using syncoid. Then, once a day, I upload encrypted daily snapshots to a bucket in the cloud using restic. Sounds complicated, but actually sanoid/syncoid and restic do all the heavy lifting. All I did is automate their schedules using systemd timers and some scripts to backup the right directories.

Very interesting project! However, I can’t help shake the feeling that whilst you pitch it as a platform for sharing DRM-free games, it will get used for sharing games against the licenses and wishes of publishers. I don’t really care about the publishers, but do you not think there is a great risk that once your app gets enough attention, it will draw their ire and force you to shut down? Perhaps not directly, but e.g., removing you from the windows store etc.

For caching, are you sure you’re generating enough traffic to benefit from it? Plus, CDN caching’s strength only really comes into play when the users are geographically distributed which isn’t really the case for most self hosters.

For DDoS check if your VPS host does DDoS protection. Some do and include it for free. I’ve been monitoring my server traffic lately. Since I’ve ditched Cloudflare, I haven’t needed DDoS protection.

You can still use Cloudflare DNS without redirecting traffic via their CDN. I do that.

The point about not revealing the IP address is a personal one it seems. I think it indeed does matter if that IP address is if your home, but not so much of it’s of a VPS in some data center. But anyway, this point seems personal.

However, everything is a trade off and everybody has a personal take on which trade off they want to take. When I was in a similar situation, I ditched CDN proxying via Cloudflare though I still kept them for DNS.

My configuration and deployment is managed entirely via an Ansible playbook repository. In case of absolute disaster, I just have to redeploy the playbook. I do run all my stuff on top of mirrored drives so a single failure isn’t disastrous if I replace the drive quickly enough.

For when that’s not enough, the data itself is backed up hourly (via ZFS snapshots) to a spare pair of drives and nightly to S3 buckets in the cloud (via restic). Everything automated with systemd timers and some scripts. The configuration for these backups is part of the playbooks of course. I test the backups every 6 months by trying to reproduce all the services in a test VM. This has identified issues with my restoration procedure (mostly due to potential UID mismatches).

And yes, I have once been forced to reinstall from scratch and I managed to do that rather quickly through a combination of playbooks and well tested backups.

What benefit do you get from running a Cloudflare proxy if you’re directing it to a VPS? I used to run with a Cloudflare proxy when my reverse proxy was hosted at home. Since then, I’ve moved it to a VPS and I no longer use the Cloudflare proxy, because I only expose the IP address of the VPS which is fine. Arguably Cloudflare provides you with DDoS protection, but that’s so far never been a problem for me.