[fitkoh]

@fitkoh

Do you have any PHP programming knowledge in your tool-sets ?..

Not really: my limited programming knowledge is entirely self taught and self guided. I haven't adhered to any particular curriculum or course of study... I just try to learn what I need to know to achieve a goal. I have bits and pieces of different languages, techniques, methods I've acquired over the years, mostly from examining other's code. Recently I've found https://www.w3schools.com to be very useful.

Perhaps a long long time ago, before stylesheets, I could have been considered fluent in javascript, but js have evolved significantly since then, and I haven't kept up with the changes. This recent project has been challenging, but I am satisfied with my progress thus far. I have some help on the client, but I've done all the integrations with the server side, and wrote the first prototype from scratch in 2 days. I then did some research and rewrote almost the entire set of scripts using newly discovered techniques. Five days later, more studying later, I rewrote about half of what I had. Now I'm working on a fourth iteration which will be heavily focused on security, in hopes of a round of beta testing maybe by early next year

More on topic: I had an idea of running the system on 2 databases: two separate servers. I'm sure there are things I'm not considering. It could be an utterly terrible idea and I just don't know why, but here's what I've come up with.

On the up side:
*split bandwidth and demand on server
*if one database was compromised, the data would be largely useless without the matching credentials

On the down side
*increased complexity in implementation and maintainence
*increased cost in time and money

As far as I can tell it's basically "keep all your eggs in one basket" or "divide and conquer"