Horizon Community is powered by a lot of cool hardware and software combinations. Lets start by understanding the hardware that has gone into hosting and networking for our community. First, we have a server which is completely capable of powering all of the requirements that we have for Horizon. We need lots of compute, storage, networking, domain services, encryption and all kinds of physical processing to be able to provide an enterprise standard, powerful infrastructure to our customers. So what are we really hosting and what are the reasons for it?

1. Forum - We need a community space. To get in touch with our customers and manage our connections, we need to get our community portal and customer base ready. We chose Invision because it is a long standing software platform in our community since 2004. For many years it has been the place where most people love to communicate. Invision provides a great community platform which powers our userbase and community needs, including ecommerce.
2. A Lab and Repository For Software - We need a competent git host where we can host our project and perform tests, run code changing and maintaining operations, a platform for our developer needs where all compute, processing and power is available for us to experiment with and manifest into the next piece of divine engineering. We need the juice it provides and we chose Gitlab Community Edition. Gitlab has been the go-to for many developers as it provides a highly performant and scalable technology for development operations and code hosting. I like the platform personally, because it does what is required and gets things working quite efficiently and fits our self-hosted platform needs. So we're hosting Gitlab by ourselves right here in our environment.
3. Virtual Machines - We require a lot of compute, storage and hosting capabilities. We need many Virtual Machines to run our hosting needs and therefore we require hardware. For our current needs I have with me a powerful dedicated server which provides the basis for our requirements. For compute we have 8 High-Performant Gitlab Runner VMs (6 Debian, 2 Windows Hosts), 1 Gitlab Server, 1 Server for Game server hosting, 1 Database Provider, 1 Project Community Host and one for our Wikipedia. To make them possible we need hardware which is capable of running these software systems and of being fault-tolerant.
4. Network - To host our website we require a public IP associated with the public internet network. To get this done we have an additional, external and out-of-our-network VPS which is providing us the infrastructure support we need to get websites working as a proxy server. By using the proxy server, we can host various internal hardware (backend) and provide the public platform interface (frontend) that we need to get our websites running. Networking is very important in technological communications and we got our setup done using OpenVPN. OpenVPN is a perfect tool to reroute your network infrastructure and forward public communication to the internal host. With this setup we've achieved the security requirements that we need to privatize our internal network and only accept public connections to our webhosts from clients outside our network.

That's all it took to create our highly available and secure domain hosting services and get our website up and running for you. With this simple yet powerful setup, we will dominate the gaming market and private server emulator industry as a newly upcoming RO private server emulator 🙂

If you think I did a good job, please like and share our website and community with others and get our community more members by word-of-mouth. I would love to see your friends and family also use our platform and services. Support us by subscribing to our services, it will help in hosting and hardware maintenance costs.

Thanks and enjoy your day ❤️ 

Updating the topic to show you how the server rack was created and assembled. Watch this timelapse video below -

 

 

This is the internal view of the server. The external is much better but the server is in place now and I don't have any images of it for now. 

This is the HP DL380 Gen10 processor.

This is the software view of it -

It is a high performance server and has 112 virtual cores which is why you see only 1% of the memory used even though we have so many running VMs and a Host OS. This server is for building software applications and providing CI/CD to my entire software ecosystem.