Deploying a Letter Boxed-Style Word Puzzle Game on DigitalOcean — Best Practices & Deployment Questions

Hello everyone,

I’m building a Letters Boxed–style word puzzle game (similar to the NYT Letter Boxed challenge) as a web application using Node.js and React. The core logic and UI work fine locally, but I’m trying to deploy this to a DigitalOcean Droplet / App Platform and I’ve run into a few questions about best practices for deployment and scaling.

What I’m Trying to Do

• Host both frontend (React) and backend (Node.js/Express) on DigitalOcean.

• Ensure fast performance for players solving Letter Boxed puzzles (real-time game logic and word validation).

• Serve dynamic content (new puzzles daily) and support user submissions/high scores.

What I’ve Tried

• Created a Droplet with Ubuntu and installed Node.js.

• Pushed code via GitHub.

• Set up a basic NGINX reverse proxy to serve the React build and API.

Issues / Questions

1. Deployment Architecture

   • Is it better to use a single monolithic Droplet or separate droplets/services for frontend and backend?

   • Would DigitalOcean App Platform simplify things for this use-case versus managing my own Droplet?

2. Performance & Scaling

   • For a Boxed game with potentially hundreds of concurrent players, what’s the most efficient way to handle scaling? Load balancer? Multiple app instances?

   • Should I consider caching puzzles/requests using Redis or similar?

3. Daily Puzzle Updates

   • My game generates new Letter Boxed puzzles every day. What’s the best way to automate that on DigitalOcean — a cron job on the server, a scheduled function, or something else?

4. Security & SSL

   • Best practices to ensure secure SSL termination (especially for API calls from React to Node) without degrading performance?

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If anyone has experience deploying similar game apps on DO especially with dynamic content and daily-updated logic, I’d really appreciate your insights!

Thanks in advance! 🙌