Thanks :) There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops

Thanks :) There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops you have to jump through to stay legal (which are mainly aimed at <generic big company>, not <joe schmoe>). I've also taken a few decisions to keep things "lean and mean", so the hardware it requires is surpisingly modest, at least for getting going. Pushing as much as possible to the free tier of Cloudflare helps, and just one box behind the HA layer can manage ~1.3M req/sec if they hit the redis layer (which I ... encourage by design :). Even going all the way down through the DB and back, it hits 50k/sec - which is rendering, not i/o. That's ... quite a bit of headroom :)