Hey all!
I’m looking into starting a stake pool by myself.
I currently try to evaluate which provider to choose as I’m not a big fan of aws hosting and how to set everything up.
For my background - I’ve been running and operating enterprise linux systems and applications for the last 10 years, 3-4 of those years linux servers specifically.
But, due to the size of my company, different tasks are quite distributed (e.g. I never configure storage or network components).
Therefore I have some questions, maybe some seasoned SPOs can help me out 
- Throughput. It’s stated in the docs that having at least 1 GBit/s is recommended for the node. Does this apply only for the relays or does it apply as well for the block generating node?
- How much traffic per month can be expected from medium sized pools? Some providers have a limit of x TB/month with 1GBit and will throttle down to 100Mbit/s. Is there a metric I can take into consideration?
- Does anyone has experience running nodes in an docker / container environment?
- If no blocks are minted during an epoch no rewards (340 ADA operational fee) will be paid out as well - correct?
- Out of curiosity - what does your setup look like? Without compromising security, can you post or talk about your architecture? I’m especially interested if you run multiple dedicated root servers / vps or use one big server and add your own VMs?
- Are all of your nodes from the same provider? Or are you trying to distribute and minimize risk?
- Do you have any sort of backup strategy? If so - what do you back up?Everything? Just the config files? What I’ve seen so far is either VM snapshots of a stable version / daily snapshots and storage of keys on external USB devices (which can be encrypted)
- Say I want to someday migrate my node to another provider. Is there some sort of way to migrate from server A to server B - at gest without any downtime?
I hope it’s okay to cluster my questions into one thread as it might reduce searchability…
Thanks in advance,
cheers from Munich,
Alex