Hi,
I spend 4 days and night just to make my pool up and running. So, here’s some thing that I want to share to you all who are planning to create their own pool. Maybe my stupidity and carelessness can cut you guys couple of hours looking the answer from the forum and telegram channel. (sorry if I take the fun part LOL ) And also some tips that I use just to make your life easier. Any critics and suggestion are welcome.
If you plan to create stake pool. Make sure you know that you will need 2 VPS Service or maybe 2 server with IP public address. 1 is for block producing node and the other is for relay. (I just know that later after I read whole documentation )
The specification that you’re looking for is 2CPU, 4GB Ram, 50GB for both server. The most common stakepooler’s use is digitalocean which will cost you around USD40.00 per month/node. So the total is about $80. Or you can find your local VPS service, I guess that’s much better for geo location purpose.
Have your Daedalus wallet ready at least 2 ADA (for Key) + 500 ADA (for Pool Deposit) + Your pledge Value. I spare about 25 ADA more just for trial.
All ADA value is in lovelace means you have to x1,000,000 (one million). For example 2 ADA = 2,000,000 lovelace.
The format of pool-margin is 0.0x means if 4% is 0.04
The minimal pool-cost is 340 ADA. Just keep it that way
Remember to install tmux, the command that you should remember
tmux new -s workingterminal
(you can change workingterminal to every name you want), Ctrl-B D to detach, and
tmux attach-session -t workingterminal
to re-attach.
The most used command that I use when I do the installation is to get transaction hash and check the ttl so what I do is I add this in ~/.bashrc
alias mybalance=’cardano-cli shelley query utxo --address $(cat payment.addr) --mainnet’
alias ttlnow= ‘cardano-cli shelley query tip --mainnet’
and remember to source it. So later if you need to know your hash or your balance just type mybalance and viola.
Have a text editor beside your terminal, write and calculate all the transaction before you do in terminal. This will help you a lot.
If you do something wrong when generate stake pool registration certificate or you want to update the pledge value, pool margin, etc. Just do everything all over again and when you submit the pool certificate and delegation certificate just deduct your balance with fee, no need to deduct pool deposit again.
Hope this will help you.
Enjoy the fun and if you think you don’t want to make your own pool kindly delegate to [ICRYP]
To be honest with you, for the small pool like me, the answer is “no”. I’m waiting when they raise K and reduce D and I really hope that there are more chance to get more delagation from ADA owner. Thanks for asking. Good question.
Any idea if the deposit amount of 500ADA can be used to go towards the stake? Under what circumstances do I receive it back, etc? Just looking to understand that as I’m ramping up servers now.
Hi again,
It’s been awhile since I write this subject. Okay, I have one other tips here. This is unofficial tips and this purely base on my experience while running my pool. But, this is probably the best tips that you’re ever gonna get before you decide to start a stake pool.
Please find an investor that have at least 1 million ~ 1.5 million $ADA. Before you think to start a pool.
Without sufficient $ADA your chance to making a block is very slim. I have personal experience running 14 epoch (70 days or about 2 months and 10 days) without creating single block.
Without making any block and looking at your cost running, It’s devastating.
So, It would be best if you have an investor. But, at the price of ADA around $1.2 it’s probably around $1.4 million (at this time I write this post). By having 1 million ~ 1.5 million ADA in your pool, I think your chance to create block every epoch is very good (no guarantee).
This is not financial advise. I just sharing my experiences. You can check my pool if you don’t believe what I’ve said. It’s ICRYP pool.
Hi! ADA-INDO, thanks for those tips. I’m looking for a VPS but don’t quite understand if I hve to rent a bare metal or if a cloud VPS (a virtual machine) will be enough. You were talking about $40 a month per node but OVH has much lower prices:
Hello @blambow ,
from the documentation - good practice is to run 8GB RAM per node. But as you can see from my graphics each node didn’t use more that 3gb of RAM. And yes you can use virtual machine,just be sure each VPS node to has static public IP. The nodes will run good on the “Essential”, but If you want to be confortable use “Comfort” as VPS plan. If you choose “Essential” maybe at the later phase you will need to upgrade to Comfort.
According to the guide, that I read. The requirement is
8 GB of RAM
24 GB of hard disk space
a good network connection and about 1 GB of bandwidth per hour
a public IP4 address
I myself using bare metal server with dual quadcore Intel xeon, 32GB RAM, and host in biggest datacenter in Indonesia for the BP node. As for the relay, I host a vps with 4vCPU and 8GB of RAM.
So far so good. The choice is always up to you, I read some people run on PI. But, why I waiting is when the Goguen launch, are the requirement will go up or not.
) And also some tips that I use just to make your life easier. Any critics and suggestion are welcome.
)
