We use CloudFlare to protect our network from breaches as well as to reduce bandwidth on the servers themselves and therefore freeing up the bandwidth for our other projects. We also use CloudFlare for instant DNS propagation across the internet where possible.

We use PHP as our main backend preprocessor. Being a well established language, it is supported by a large community as well as a dedicated team of developers. It is used for much heavier projects that do not require realtime processes as well as being used in a hybrid system alongside NodeJS.

We use MySQL and variants thereof to store the data for our projects such as the community. MySQL being a well established product means that support is available whenever it is required along with an extensive list of support articles all over the web for diagnosing issues. Variants are also used where needed when, for example, better performance is needed.

We use HTML5 as our main base for our websites. Being an industry standard, it means that it is well established in all recent web browsers.

We use VMWare vSphere to allow us to virtualise our environment. This means that we don't have to have as many physical servers to split our infrastructure as we would otherwise. vSphere also enables us to move our virtual machines between different servers as required such as if we need to perform essential maintenance on a host while keeping to our belief of having high availability of all of our services wherever possible.

We use OVH to host the majority of our servers spread across the globe. This allows us to have a single point of contact for our main hosting when issues arise as well as giving us the ability to quickly failover servers when needed. OVH also helps us by keeping the price we pay for servers down therefore keeping the fees on our products themselves down.

Lodash provides us with extra Javascript functionality that makes working with various objects much easier than it would be otherwise therefore speeding up development time.

We use Mustache to allow us to create easy and reusable templates on our sites.

We use SASS to make our CSS easier to read as well as making updates to colour schemes or global margins quicker and easier than having to modify individual files.

We use Discord for our community as well as generic staff communications. It works as a main selling point for ShadowICT as well as a central place for monitoring alerts and announcements to go.

We use Nagios to monitor our stack and alert us when problems arise. Nagios allows us to monitor every aspect of each of our servers such as running processes, CPU usage, disk usage, and more. This means that as soon as problems arise, we can detect them and call out an engineer to resolve the issues as soon as possible.

We use Grafana to view live stats relating to our servers such as memory and CPU usage. We also use Grafana to monitor our gaming servers for data such as latency and player counts. This allows us to generate effective analytics and see when problems arise.

We use InfluxDB as a store for our data that gets fed into Grafana. It's ideal for this as it's a lightweight storage engine that can be modified on the fly by scripts without having to log into the server itself and manage tables. The HTTP API also makes it ideal for integrating with frontend services.

We use NodeJS as one of the systems for our backends. We use NodeJS primarily when working with apps that need to work in realtime or carry out many actions asynchronously. We also use NodeJS for our custom Nagios and Grafana reporting and monitoring tools.