Finding the right hosting plan to run a stakepool or other node software can be quite difficult, with so many options to choose from and a steadily growing blockchain. To give a reference, I’ll share my experiences with the plan I’m using for the StakeSync DB Viewer. Note that it’s running Cardano Node, DB Sync, Smash and StakeSync, regular stake pools usually only need the node and can go for smaller plans.
After testing various providers, I went with crowncloud.net and their OpenVZ OVZ-C-4096 plan (6-Core, 4G Ram, HD, 13$/month). It performed well at first but started to hit capacity recently, so I leveled up to the OVZ SSD 4 plan (4-Core, 4G Ram, SSD, 20$/month). Performance was noticeably increased, but the limited ram caused Smash to get killed during build. Similar results with the KVM equivalent KVM SSD 4, so I ended up picking the OVZ-C-6144 (7-Core, 6G Ram, HD, 19$/month), which is running without issues. When it’s time for another upgrade, I will probably switch to one of the more expensive SSD plans with >6G ram, but for servers in the sub 20$-range you’ll get most performance (compared by price) with a non-ssd plan in my experience. Depends on the hosting plan and type of applications you are going to run though. (Ps. I’m not affiliated to CrownCloud, it just happens to be the provider I chose for this server).
I made a screen recording of htop while running the different services for better impression:
Minute 0-1: OS only (Debian 10)
Minute 1-2: Node
Minute 2-3: Node + DB Sync
Minute 3-4: Node + DB Sync + Smash
Minute 4-5: Node + DB Sync + Smash + StakeSync
The video only shows the time when all components are synced up, keep in mind that the build- and initial sync phase takes up additional resources.
Feel free to share your providers/plans as well for comparison and in order to encourage decentralization of stake pool hosting (would be healthy to have a less large portion being hosted by AWS and Google).