ESP8266 Community Forum

Dear all, I'm a newbie in this regard. In my project, I need a system without the necessity of reconfiguring the router. The nodes can make use of any Wi-Fi network available. The server can be in somewhere else, and the users can only get the permitted data from the server, not directly from the nodes. One more thing, if the nodes can sleep and awake only when the server calls, it will be better.

What confuses me is how the model should look like. Some examples of ESP8266 use the ESP8266 as a web server. Some use ESP8266 as a client and it POST its data to a cloud server (Thingspeak in this case) regularly. Which one is more suitable for my system, I cannot verify.

I'd highly appreciate any comments or suggestions. Thank you in advance!

Hi minhib,
If you set up ESP8266 as server is you can't do https or SSL gracefully without too much user intervention such as firmware changes and opening ports of your router. Besides this might not pass from local regulators as standards are taking into account network security nowadays anyways.
So making ESP8266 as Client is the most secure thing to do.

But if you communicate every now and then to the cloud/server that will strain the network. This could be bad in the overall design of IoT. Specially for devices that uses already too much resources such as regular interrupts.
I think you have come into the situation that you just have to weigh in the bad and the good. We are together in the same boat. But if you ask me personally? We should not be asking people to open their ports manually.

Let me know what you think of this?