PhotonamusWeb - This Infrastructure

[Photonamus]

So I thought maybe I should explain the actual infrastructure behind these forums and the website and stuff. Basically this post is going to document what is going on for anyone else interested in standing up their own web stack.

I will cover the hardware I use and all of the costs involved (not much) and the process I used to get this all up and running the way it is now.

So first off let's get right into the core of this whole thing the hardware. What is PhotonamusWeb? That is the name of the server all of this runs off of. I run a pair of servers actually. The first is a tiny pi4 running 17 services that are all facing my own home network. It serves the house and any internal network stuff. We will cover that thing in a different post later on it needs it. And the other server is the one this stuff runs off of. This one has all the public outward facing stuff on it. 2 servers 2 jobs serving inward and outward from my network.

Ok so let's take a quick look at said hardware for a moment.

PhotonamusWeb — STGAubron ABR0222 Gaming Diamond
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790 @ 3.60GHz (Haswell, 4 cores / 8 threads, LGA 1150)
Motherboard: STGAubron Intel B85 (LGA 1150, Haswell chipset)
RAM: 16GB DDR3 (2x 8GB @ 1333 MT/s)
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti 6GB GDDR6 (present but unused — headless)
Boot Drive: Western Digital Green 240GB SATA SSD
Storage Drive: Western Digital Blue 1TB SATA SSD (mounted at /mnt/storage)
Network: Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6 + Bluetooth 5.0 (unused)
Chassis: Mid-tower, white, 8x RGB fans
OS: Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So this is our server and the site/forums and other stuff is all running off of this one little box. It is not breaking a sweat to do this. Is this fantastic hardware? Nope this is FREE hardware LOL. But it works and I have zero investment in hardware only my time. I cleanup the machine and went over everything made sure it was all working and in good order. A refurb job essentially. Once that was done I loaded it up with ubuntu server as a headless server. I did this from my own machine. Both servers work this way they are headless and I can ssh into them and use terminal to do the work. As for a web address? A .com address through cloudflare at the time of purchase was $10.48 USD. I also use claude code to write most of the stuff and get work done fast. So I have a $21.50 a month bill for that. Though once the site is up forums work and everything is built it becomes manageable from my end without anything else. Use the big tools to stand it up then build some systems to update and manage it and it just works basically. It's not exactly difficult these days or expensive either. No excuses get those servers up fellas we need em

I will be coming back to this one with a lot more information on the process later but I wanted to at least give everyone a look at what is going on and how it became possible.