It's finally up - a public demo page using the sqlchain api backend. I think there are a few issues still as I noticed a few example calls didn't produce expected data. I'll look into that and figure out what's going on. This demo is served from the Vultr 2GB instance as the Hudson Valley one is utterly incapable of catching up. I disabled sqlchain there and won't be using that system much except maybe as backup data.

The demo is reverse proxied behind nginx and using a free letsencrypt SSL certificate. It all seems to work well. I wasn't happy with how python 2.7 supports SSL - it requires the key file be readable by the user running the daemon since it needs to read the file for each request. In newer versions they read the key once at creation, which is good because after root reads it, then permissions can be dropped. Anyway, using nginx bypasses that issue and allows for more flexible configurations.

I've added a bit of info to the install guide covering this. Just follow a few install steps from the nginx web site first. Worked for me first time.

Here are some current database values on the demo server:

blocks.MYD      449,877 records         37 MB
address.MYD     217,470,124 records     5,871 MB
trxs.MYD        190,540,221 records     10,289 MB
outputs.MYD     529,494,252 records     15,355 MB  (blown away by how many records now)
mempool.MYD     44,436 records          499 KB

I guess we'll see how fast the demo page works. It's not exactly on a fast server - fairly modest even: 2 vCPU VPS with 2GB memory and 45 GB SSD costing 3 cents/hour or $20/month. Oh, there is a free 50 GB block volume mounted. Only recent transactions will show signature data (raw transaction api call decodes this data for html view) as I hollowed out most of the file. Only about 358 MB of witness data is online.

I've been looking around for a cheap dedicated server that accepts bitcoin. There are some very cheap offerings from OVH and their group of cohorts. They don't take bitcoin and I just don't like how much ID documents they require; plus reports are they take forever to verify them anyway. Hudson Valley has some cheap offerings but unfortunately I no longer trust they will be honest about server sharing / load.

The best I think I've seen yet is actually namecheap. That's a surprise because, even though I use them for domains, and I love that they accept bitcoin, in the past their hosting options were not very interesting to me. Now they offer a decent machine for pretty good price:

Xeon E3-1220 v3 4 Cores x 3.1 GHz
RAM 8 GB DDR3
HARD DRIVE 300 GB SSD  (spec'd as Intel DC S3500 by their support)
BANDWIDTH 10 TB

$58.88/mo

Excellent price for this much SSD space, and the CPU, though not stellar, is likely a usable amount of power; unlike some places offering Atom D525s as servers for this price. It's still a bit beyond my budget unless I have some revenue stream coming from the server. So I am working on putting something up that could potentially at least cover it's cost with adverts and/or user memberships.