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Host

  • Siteground – Our WordPress instance is hosted on Siteground.  We are on the StartUp plan, which is the lowest tier.  It’s a shared hosting plan and has 10 GB of storage space.  The plan should provitde us plenty of resources, but we can always upgrade to the GrowBig plan, or migrate our WordPress instance to a new host entirely if we find a better price.

Domains

  • Siteground – We have the usa505.org and 505tanktalk.com domains registered on Siteground.

DNS

  • Cloudflare – Normally your domain registration service is your DNS as well.  However, we use Cloudflare with our website.  Cloudflare provides security against malicious requests as well as provides static content caching.  Any request to https://usa505.org is intercepted by Cloudflare and then continues Siteground.  Since we can theoretically turn Cloudflare “off” at anytime and we would want the same behavior, the DNS entries in Siteground mirror the entries in Cloudflare.  If you ever add DNS entry, make sure to add it to Cloudflare and Siteground.

Cache & CDN

  • Cloudflare – Cloudflare caches all of the static resources on the website.  This includes images, styles, and javascripts that don’t change per page.  Cloudflare then distributes these resources geographically closer to the end users using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).  The Siteground host is geographically located in Chicago, but there are Cloudflare CDN data centers all around the word that will locate resources closer to the end user, which speeds up page loads.

Monitoring

  • Freshping – We use Freshping to monitor the status of the website at https://status.usa505.org

Email

  • Mailchimp – For all marketing style email newsletters
  • Mailgun – Our Email API service that is used by the website.  The classifieds and the “Contact Us” features depend on Mailgun.  We also have several email Routes that forward email to configurable addresses.  For example, any mail sent to region1@mg.usa505.org will forward messages to whoever is the Region One Coordinator.  We do this so whenever there is a new regional coordinator, we don’t need to modify email addresses on the website, we can just update the configuration in Mailgun.
  • G Suite – For user email accounts.  There are a few users that have usa505.org email accounts.  We have these configured through G Suite.  Our plan was grandfathered in and is completely free.

API & Services

  • Google API – We use the Google API for a few external services.  These services are the Google Location search for the classifieds and the Google Calendar integration on the Schedule.  Technically, the Google Analytics is also a Google API.

Analytics

  • Google Analytics – We use Google Analytics for our analytics.

Communication

  • Slack – We have a Slack workspace at usa505.slack.com.  We use it for quick communications as well as bot notifications.

Tools

  • Zapier – Zapier is a service that connects other web services.  For example, when a payment is posted on Stripe, a message is sent to Slack.