What is the best server configuration for a secure chat app

[Strapi]

Hi,

 

I am looking for server solution for a secure chat application which I am building and looking forward to moving into production with it. So I need a production server for the same. The chat application is a highly secure and encrypted android application. I am looking at having around 5000 active phones at the beginning of the production and it might only go up from then onward. I require a high secure and highly scalable server solution to deploy my application server and CRM web application into production.

 

Can anyone help me with the server configuration which would be best for my requirement. 

[pythonmegapixel]

Unless you are extremely experienced in configuring this kind of thing, I strongly recommend using something like Firebase. They do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to security for you, including user authentication and securing access to the database, and provide convenient APIs.

 

(Note it's not exactly a plug-and-play solution; you still need to work some things out for yourself)

[Strapi]

4 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Unless you are extremely experienced in configuring this kind of thing, I strongly recommend using something like Firebase. They do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to security for you, including user authentication and securing access to the database, and provide convenient APIs.

 

(Note it's not exactly a plug-and-play solution; you still need to work some things out for yourself)

I was thinking of going to a server solution company to get this done. But I still need to know what would be the viable hardware configuration that I can go for.

[mariushm]

You could start by renting out some AWS server or servers and later as the demand increases you could move to your own servers. 

Your app could retrieve a server list from an embedded location, like  let's say  serverlist.yourdomain.com/list.json  (or whatever format you want) and this way you could update servers as needed. 

 

From there, it depends on how you do the application. Do you store the messages in a database, do you decrypt / encrypt etc ?

 

If you don't store anything, you could just get some servers with a lot of ram and just keep data in ram for hours (and auto mirror/clone messages to all servers or at least a few servers for redundancy in case one server crashes) ...  let's say 1 KB per message ... with 5000 users you'd only be looking at 5 MB of memory ... even if you have 10 messages per minute, you would use maybe 0.5 MB per user per hour 

 

Though keep in mind it's not just the hardware, if your app becomes popular you'd also need a datacenter with some ddos protection (using cloudflare could help but proper ddos protections may be needed)