Newbee Q - Which Server Setup Option is Best?

[wint0178]

I'm curious how to pick which Server Setup Option to use. I'll provide a brief description of my project goals below.

I am working on creating a set of weather station networks for use in several separated communities in Ecuador. What I mean by separated is that that they are not near oneanother. Each community's weather station network will need to include numerous sensors, perhaps a dozen, and nodes along with replicate gateways to ensure it can continue to transmit data even when a gateway or node goes down.

I would love to have one master server in the United States that I manage locally (Windows or RaspPi), but am not sure if this is possible. If needed, I could install a RaspberryPi-based server in each community and it would have WiFi access and 120V power. Based on this description, can you recommend eitehr Server Setup otpion #1 or #2?

Ultimately, I need to give data access to the communities themselves through the dashboard and SMS or email notifications. I would also like to have remote access to the data, but this is slightly less critical.

Any feedback or insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Please keep in mind that I am a newbee with some copy/paste Arduino experience and similar work in Windows Cmd, but otherwise very little knowledge of how all this works. To be clear, I often discover while trying to answer a question about this project that I have not even ben using the correct words to ask the question comprehensibly.

[jkandasa]

@wint0178 I am trying to respond your queries to my best. You may have better approach then my response too.

I assume that, you are using MySensors hardware in your setup.
As you have your gateways in different locations, you can connect all your gateways with MQTT connection (I would recommend secure MQTT).
You have to run a MyController server for 24x7, so you can go with RPI, it will save lot of your electricity and space.

Ultimately, I need to give data access to the communities themselves through the dashboard and SMS or email notifications. I would also like to have remote access to the data, but this is slightly less critical.

With MyController you can configure Email and web-hook(you may use it for SMS), For now there is no role based access in MyController v2. In MyController all the metric data will be in influx database. So you may share the details with Grafana dashboard too. I think it has read only dashboard.