The storage number nobody warns you about when you run an explorer

Deployed on a 16GB, six-CPU box with roughly 1.5TB of attached volume. That last number is the one that surprises people and it is the whole operational story. A full address index over Bitcoin is not the size of the chain, it is an order of magnitude larger, because answering “every transaction touching this address” requires a mapping the chain itself never keeps. Anyone sizing a machine from blockchain size alone provisions a tenth of what they need and discovers it during the index build.

The index build is the fragile phase. It runs long, it is where a crash or an out-of-memory kill costs most, and it has to finish before the explorer serves anything useful, so planning the deployment means planning that build.

Frontend and backend deploy separately, which is what makes the operation tolerable: the frontend redeploys in seconds, the backend has 1.5TB of state attached. Coupling them would make every copy change a risk to the index. The staging environment is frontend-only for the same reason, since a second index is expensive and would not make staging more useful.

The README carries server addresses and access details that belong in a password manager.