Hey SPO’s 
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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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. 
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thanks for all the responses so far.
Really interesting to see all those different setups 
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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:
- Have a reasonably reliable internet connection (most already have a 99% reliable home internet)
- Re-purpose a linux machine
- apt install cardano-node
- systemctl start cardano-node
- 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. 
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