What do you pay for your servers?

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
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Hey SPO’s :slight_smile:

Id like to get a slight overview about prices for your setups if you might share with me.

What setups are you running and what are you paying for this service?

Cheers
Fabian

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Hi,

BP - bare metal DELL MINI PC bought with ~400$ CPU intel 9500T 32G RAM, 256G nvme + 1T SSD for cardano DB

1Relay VPS - cloud (same specification) ~ 17$/month
1Relay VDS - cloud (same characteristics) ~ 50$/month

Cheers,

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That is a really good question. But, maybe it should be reworded to be “What do I pay extra in order to run my stake pool?”

The truth is that the vast majority of my network / computing infrastructure + internet service costs are ongoing expenses that I would still have even if I wasn’t running a stake pool. In fact, I had essentially the same costs even before I started running a stake pool.

I have only really paid for 2 additional things:

  • An additional relay with Contabo costing $203.55 per year
  • A 4/5G Mobile backup network costing around $150/year

Though both of these extras probably only increase my network reliability from around 99.5% to 99.6%.

So I would say my real cost to run a highly reliable stake pool is pretty close to $0.

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4

Hosting from home, I just pay the price of the hardware and then it’s just electricity/internet.

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I am interested to know: How much of your hardware, electricity and internet costs would you still have if you stopped running your stake pool?

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3 machines on Azure with 3 year contract are $190/month
1 bare metal machine running from home, IDK how to calculate the costs. A bit extra electricity. I already pay for internet.

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Probably no extra cost really. I already run a lot of stuff at home - so the machines are already on all the time, and I need internet without having to run a pool too. :wink:

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8

thanks for all the responses so far.

Really interesting to see all those different setups :stuck_out_tongue:

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We need to drive down the costs of running a stake pool and make it easier and easier to do.

It should be as easy as:

  1. Have a reasonably reliable internet connection (most already have a 99% reliable home internet)
  2. Re-purpose a linux machine
  3. apt install cardano-node
  4. systemctl start cardano-node
  5. create the keys and register on chain

People can delegate to your pool if they want or they can run a pool themselves. Multi-wallet delegation can be used to distribute risk and smooth out reward return lumpiness.

This is how we achieve, as @Michael.Liesenfelt cries, “epic decentralisation”.

After all, isn’t blockchain supposed to be about removing rent-seekers? If there are no fat profits to be had, and it is easy enough that anyone can do it, then there will be no rent-seekers.

By the way, I am not pointing my finger at any current stake pool operators nor saying that there is rent-seeking currently happening. I am simply stating that if there is no profit motive, and there are no barriers to competition, then there will be no rent-seekers.

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Hi,
Operator 1 - bare metal bp - intel xeon w-2125 4.0ghz 32G RAM 500G SSD

Operator 3 - relay bare metal I7 3770 3.4 GHZ 32 G RAM 250g SSD 1T SATA

Operator 4 - relay bare metal i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz 32G RAM 200G SSD

Operator 2, 5 and 6 have both private relays and backup which i cannot describe for ethical reasons. I hope you understand. :smiley::+1:

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