You're very right to point out high availability and disaster recovery. I must be honest that I haven't considered the impact that the use of SQLite has on redundancy, but in the multiple years that I have been running the forum I never needed it, a single instance of the forum works perfectly fine. I would say that for most communities, setting up the forum on a VPS and letting it run will be perfectly adequate and that creating redundant servers would be overkill.

As for backups, of course we do have them. Although I've also recently learned that we could be handling them better. SQLite has a backup API that we should make use of[1].

The main reason I have set up CloudFlare is for DDoS protection. I learned the hard way that Digital Ocean will null route a VPS' network if they detect a DDoS.

1 - https://www.sqlite.org/backup.html

Fair enough. How do you do backups?

Mainly using DigitalOcean's droplet backups.

This thread reminds me of Basecamps Getting Real book.

Just getting it done. I am now intrigued to try Nim if you are core dev.

Have you researched the potential pitfalls of relying only on crash-consistent VM backups? For example, I read that if you're using the ext4 filesystem, the data=journal option is safer than the default (data=ordered, I think).

Nope. I should probably read up on it a bit more :)