Hey guys, I’m starting this thread to collect validator node specs and data on the real incurred costs at your cloud provider (or your personal operation). This was requested by Matt to help re-evaluate if the $500/month validator subsidy still makes sense (Discord)
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i’m at around 350€ per month for 2 nodes.
1 node being a bare metal one, and the other one that meets the minimum requirement hosted in azure as backup.
This does not include hosting costs of a website , ssl certs, etc…
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260 Euro per month.
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Around $450-$500/month for primary and backup in different Azure regions in the US. 3 year reservations of E4a V4 instances, reserved IPs, and 256GB disks in each one.
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My main server is a physical one in Aruba webfarm, with 32 GB RAM, 16 core (including hypertreading), two RAID-1 960 GB SSD disks and a iDRAC (useful if anything goes wrong). It costs me €99.5 / month.
My backup server is a virtual machine in OVH France, with 16 GB RAM, 8 dedicated virtual processors, 320 GB HDD. It costs me € 639.76 / year.
My total expenses is about € 153 / month.
Please note: I have a discount on Aruba services because I’ve been working there for about 15 years.
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We are running three dedicated servers spread over different datacenters. As well some firewalls.
Hosting costs + hardware investment (spread over 36 months) are ± € 950 / month. To be honest we have to mention that we run much more than just a validator and a backup node.
In our opinion to run a professional Radix node you need at least 3 servers or VPS in different availability zones:
1x Main node
1x Backup node
1x Monitoring service
A node needs at least 32 GB ram and NVME disks to run stable without missing proposals.
Intel Xeon is great for java processing but slow in starting up. AMD processors are amazing for fast startup times for backup nodes but have higher loads when running.
When running two Radix API gateway’s as well which are needed for our infrastructure you need much more.
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Radstakes’ primary validator has 64GB RAM, 6 core Intel Xeon, 2x1TB NVMe SSDs and a 1Gbit/s uplink. The backup is similarly spec’d at a completely separate data centre and provider. These costs (not including web hosting, monitoring etc.) are around $260/month.
I also spin up Stokenet nodes as and when required for testing which are not included in the above. Generally I think the Subsidy is generous enough to cover my costs at present.
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StakeNordic runs a dedicated server with Ryzen 3600 6C(12T), 32 gb ddr4, 2x1tb nvme ssd in raid-1 and 10gb Ethernet connection.
Backup is a vps with requirements specificed but works stable the few times used.
Tertiary backup is shared server in my basement with higher specs, but i don’t include the cost for this since it has other uses.
Total costs is about 280euro currently without monitoring, vpn access, hosting, stokenet etc.
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My main node is self-hosted with the following specs:
- Ryzen 3600 (soon to be upgraded to 5800x)
- 64 GB DDR4 RAM (48GB dedicated to Radix)
- 2TB Samsung 980 PRO NVMe SSD
- 2TB HDD for backups
- 1500VA UPS
- 1Gbit/s fiber connection
which costed me approximately 1200€. (most of which were the SSD and RAM)
I have two backup nodes on Hetzner which cost me a total of 82€ a month, with similar spec, but smaller (and cheaper) SSD.
Monitoring is done via Grafana Agent so no need for an additional server for that.
I expect my main server to last three years (maybe even more), with the most likely component to fail being the SSD (sadly most expensive one…). See all my struggles with stopping radixdlt-node from destroying my SSD here.
I also had a 4G failover on my main node but I removed that because failing over to the 4G modem was too slow and buggy, now I just switch to the backup nodes.
Considering a lifespan of 36 months before needing upgrades or replacement I would put the cost to a bit more than 35€ a month, including power costs, excluding my Internet bill.
I would put my total costs at 120€~ a month, but I’m running an unusual self-hosted setup, still maintaining very good uptime though imo.
I also think the subsidy is enough.
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Between USD $400-500 per month on AWS for 3 nodes - mainnet primary, mainnet backup, stokenet. The variations come from experimenting, controlled upgrades and traffic size. Primary and backup running according to recommended specs. Stokenet running on a smaller spot instance.
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As for my own servers, I’m paying about $600 a month for all of my DigitalOcean services, which includes
- 2 droplets (servers), each with a with a Storage-Optimized configuration that includes 32 GB RAM, 4 dedicated CPUs, and 600 GB high-speed NVME disks
- Scheduled backups and backup storage
- 150 GB detachable mount points for database backups
- Storage for manual ad-hoc snapshots of droplets and mount points