Well, at the moment there is not much reason to be online here, apart from periodically checking the forum posts for progress. :D
I guess once trading is set up, and there is some promotion, traffic will come automatically.

I don't expect to get a lot of traffic. Barter probably didn't have that many.
Current online users = number of people who made a request to the server in the last 15 minutes. It can mean there's always only one person online at the same time. :P
Heck, half of the site usage stats for the first month are my own activity.

So, I'm pretty sure we can deal with the extra traffic when it's online ;)
If not, then we can always upgrade the server, or move the site to a new server entirely, or multiple servers with load balancing, etc.
To be honest, I'm not the one who should reply to this-- the very fact that I have Alex host me is so she can deal with these things for me because it helps get more experience as a host.

(Which reminds me, Alex, still no plans to install php_ext_br for brotli support? That would *really* help with the traffic :P)

Should I take into account the piece where you don't want to install php extensions (even though it's the first extension I've been asking for and it's entirely to your benefit), or the piece where you ask us to be responsible about bandwidth use? ;)

More seriously i think that this is the kind of extension that you won't need to reinstall once it's done... it's a generic implementation, not a full featured platform. ^^ and I only asked again because you never flat out refused, so I'm surprised you'd say that now.

I don't think she doesn't want to install it, I guess it has more to do with the "Sorry, I really wish I could, but I don't really have too much time to invest in managing the server" bit. I understand the brotli extension is not critical for the site to work, so it is not a priority for her. It might save some bandwidth (can't say how much) but compression affects the CPU utilization and from what I've read on other posts you seem to be more limited on the CPU side than on the bandwidth. Sure, the brotli extension sounds great if you look at the specifications and theory behind it, but there are other priorities right now :P

By the way, thanks Alex for letting me know about the Vesta control panel. I'm using ISPConfig myself and I found it quite interesting. I might give it a try on a VM to see how they both compare.

Vesta is interesting but has bugs when using let's encrypt. (Iirc they only happen if you have a reverse proxy so you should be safe.)

Regarding brotli, I'm not asking for an Apache extension but a php extension. The difference is with php I compress the css and js files once, save them in a cache folder, and the rest is up to supported browsers (Firefox and chrome). The savings are about 10% compared to the gz version. That means about 5 to 8KB per page load (with an empty cache of course). It's not much but I like saving bytes. Those who use Wedge could confirm. I'm obsessed with low resource usage. Which is my only reason for asking for brotli and http2.