Hello, my name is Hayden and I am the original founder of the Hotel California Stake Pool (Ticker: CALI).
Background
I am a software engineer by trade and have over 14 years working in the IT consulting world, working on everything from enterprise software deployments, full stack development, data migrations and data management and the list goes on.
I have also had a lot of experience deploying and managing hosted cloud solutions using the large providers (Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (Google Cloud).
This puts me in a very suitable position to run a high performing, reliable and secure stake pool.
Cardano
My first ADA purchase was in December 2017 and I have been slowly accumulating ever since (I have never sold any). From this time I have been following the project closely (mostly quietly via r\cardano Reddit) through the highs (and a few lows) and I am in it from the long haul because I believe in what they are trying to achieve and can see the potential.
I did consider running a stake pool in the Incentivised Test-net (ITN) and even got one up and running for the experience, however, I chose not to pursue this (and save some of my sanity and spare time). This was largely due to the major difference in technology between the ITN (written in Rust) and the final Main-net (written in Haskell).
Location and Stake Pool Name
I am actually based in Australia even though I have chosen Hotel California as the stake pool name. I did have a list of potential stake pool names but landed on Hotel California as the song happened to play on Spotify as I was setting up the pool and thought it would be a great name for a stake pool (you should have another listen to the song and see if you agree!)
In hindsight I realise this may be a little confusing for delegators interested in staking with someone based on their geographic location and may have lost some potential delegators because of it… At this point I really love the name and would find it terribly hard to change. Eventually, depending on demand, I may create a few other sibling stake pools and might have to consider other names (maybe Ill use famous hotel names or other song names).
Stake Pool Setup
I have chosen to use Amazon (AWS) primarily for hosting the stake pool setup. AWS provide a very flexible tools for rapid deployment and allows us to be very agile. This is important in these early days while Cardano is rapidly changing and frequent updates and tuning is required.
AWS allows us to spin up new relays and move our block producing node in a matter of minutes as well as ramp up or down system specs when required/appropriate.
We acknowledge that a variety of infrastructure including bare metal home setups and hosted solutions is ideal for fully decentralised network.
Our nodes (currently we have two relays and one block producing node) are sitting relatively close together in the US and while some operators may argue you need relays all over the globe, I would argue that having your relays close to your block producing node is the most efficient and our relays will connect to a variety of other relays with a spread of geographic locations. While this may not sound very decentralised to you, I believe that singe pool operators do not need be geographically distributed for a decentralised network, rather the network as a whole will naturally be decentralised because operators setup in a variety of locations with different infrastructure. Hopefully one day demand for our services will grow and we will look into setting up other pools in other regions.
Pledge and Fees
Pledge: 100K ADA (this will hopefully grow as we start to produce blocks)
Fixed Fee: 340 ADA (the minimum)
Pool Margin: 2%
Delegation
So far we have been a little unlucky with delegators so far and we have lost a couple of delegators early on most likely to bigger pools with more stake. We will persist and through our overall performance along with ramping up our contributions to the community, gain the trust of delegators.
Community
We want to make meaningful contributions to the community and not just spam the community with repetitive information. So far I will admit we have been fairly quiet on the community front, however we have made a start by:
- Writing a JavaScript epoch timer with sample code. See forum post
- Contributing feedback to CNTools used by stake pool operators
Contact
Feel free to contact us through
Website: hotelcaliforniasp.com
Twitter: @Hotel_Cali_SP
Telegram: @Hotel_Cali_SP
