View source for GP Understanding The Risks

The risks usually involved with supporting your own server add up to remembering to perform duties, such as renewing SSL certifications, domains and regularly updating software (general maintenance).

== Renewals ==
You may set your SSL certifications to expire once a year, or every 90 days, but your domain can only be renewed by the year (which you may order multiple years). You may choose to update your server once a month but there may be a major vulnerability floating around, so you'd wanna get logged in sooner than later to apply any patches/updates.

In the future there could be an economic point we could somehow house multiple pirate ships. However, this project is also to encourage decentralization, every ship having its own island of the Internet.

=== SSL ===
It encrypts all traffic possible between you and the visitor. In some cases, it verifies the website is authenticated. We want to always make sure this is current and renewable.

=== Domains ===
If by chance you are not able to afford the renewal on your domain, it may be placed up for auction by the registrar, and or you may never get back. Reach out to your supporters to secure donations, if possible, in times of need. You would be totally surprised who may be there to help.

''And pssst.'' Do not search your desired domain on registrars prior to buying them.

== Cloudflare usage ==
There are multitudes of content distribution networks available on the Internet, but few are free, and few are reliable - and few are super easy to use.

Cloudflare expresses it sticks to good privacy standards.

You may read more here:

[https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/us-privacy-compliance/ Cloudflare and US privacy law compliance | Cloudflare]

And here:

[https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/gdpr/ Cloudflare and GDPR compliance | Cloudflare]

=== What does Cloudflare do? ===
Cloudflare is a middleperson which does routing and load balancing on you and your server's behalf. It serves content from its nearest facility (or edge server) directly to the website's visitor. So, this means in practice it could intercept traffic, but vows not to.

It is up to you to make a decision if you wish to use this service. If choosing no, t to use Cloudflarehere are other options available to help keep your website fast, and loading quickly, but could cost a few dollars a month.

West Virginia Pirate Party uses Cloudflare.

== That's it! ==
Other than setting aside 10 minutes to check your server to see what needs done, keeping software up to date, it should go smooth!

<nowiki>[[GP_Prepping_and_Installing_Linux]]</nowiki>