Oh wow so you've changed quite a bit about the backend then.

Our thinking was that even if it's complicated to run on a small server, it's already had 7 years of testing and fixes for a large-scale environment, so if it ever took off we'd be equipped to scale it easily. I think we ended up making things easy on ourselves thankfully.

2GB of RAM is impressive, I think our deployment takes up 3GB minimum. Your 2-server setup is interesting, the design sounds useful so one server can be a dedicated "gatekeeper". Do you use cloudflare or any DDOS protection, or do you do that yourself too?

Our cloudflare servers do a similar thing to your data query system, I think cloudflare actually ends up directly serving about 60% of our data or so, just mirroring what we already have. So it's probably not as robust as yours, but ours also only serves updates in a way. And cloudflare acts as a globally distributed server network. It's pretty good for being free. But it's not open-source, and we do sacrifice a bit of control over our system for the DDOS protection and distributed cached serving. But it seems to have been worth it so far. d3rr just wrote a script to scrape the original (pre-cloudflare) IP addresses from the header information and add those to our DDOS blocking list and ban individual IP addresses. So we've been able to work around the shortcomings.