Hosting provider comparison

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).

My plan from Contabo for nodes:

VPS L SSD

Monthly Base Price €14.99. €17.84 incl. 19% VAT

  • CPU 8 vCPU Cores
  • RAM 30 GB RAM
  • STORAGE 800 GB SSD
  • PORT 600 Mbit/s Port
  • SNAPSHOT 3 Snapshots

But u can start with this and u can upgrade in future

VPS M SSD

Monthly Base Price €8.99. €10.70 incl. 19% VAT

  • CPU 6 vCPU Cores
  • RAM 16 GB RAM
  • STORAGE 400 GB SSD
  • PORT 400 Mbit/s Port
  • SNAPSHOT 2 Snapshots
1 Like

Wow this is super super cheap, almost too good to be true. A 2cpu and 4gb ram machine on google cloud is around 25$ per month for comparison. What is the SLA like for uptime and any issues from your experience? in found comparable prices only in the middle of russia

Hello,

Since september last year no issues

Cheers,

Fantastic! this is like Lidle prices … and the quality at Lidle is decent

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did someone compare with Digital Ocean? it seems cheaper than them, or?

Do you run just the Block Producer, or a full 2 relay and 1 PB setup?

@Alexd1985 I also have the contabo VPS-L SSD, but for mainnet with db-sync it just cannot keep up. I cannot reach a full sync from db-sync. It seem that IOPS would be ratelimited. Using fio I get 3000/1000IOPS read/write. DB-sync requires 60K.
Do you also run DB-SYNC? How are you dealing with it?

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Nope, what is this? You can try SSD solution I believe