I'm working on setting up a hosting service tailored towards Bitcoin full nodes. I know there's services like Voltage that already do this but I'm working on building out a bare metal service that will provide BIOS level access to a dedicated server. My background is in IT so I've spent the past 20 years setting up servers and racking them in Colo's. I'm posting this to guage interest in this service.
Specs would be:
a single multi core enterprise grade Xeon CPU 32GB of ECC memory 1TB of usable hardware RAID-1 space on 7,200 RPM disks aprox. 5Mb of traffic but burstable to 1Gb/s with overages billed to you
Cost would be around $278/month billed annually or a higher rate for month to month. I've looked at other services and this appears to be around the going rate, but they aren't configured for Bitcoin hosting which needs around 500GB for the full blockchain.
The Data Center I'm looking at is in Reno NV but if there's demand I would limit the number of nodes per data center to 32 and expand into other states. I feel this is important as it limits the centrality of Lightning routing nodes.
I believe this would be some rock solid Bitcoin and Lightning hosting, but I've always worked for someone else who was finding customers and this is my first attempt to start a business on my own. Please give me feedback here or email "zeusmczeusman@protonmail.com". I would need some commitments to go ahead and start purchasing hardware and signing colo contracts, but I already have the hardware spec'd out and could execute on my plan fairly quickly once I had dedicated customer.
just FYI my monthly costs for running a nostr relay are around $70 CAD (about 54 USD)
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I'm assuming it's in a colo but is that for a virtual machine or bare metal?
Just sticking your own server in a colo could be pretty cheap but I'm looking to provide the hardware and even hardware monitoring, plus a couple hard drive replacements per year.
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Its running in a virtual machine in DigitalOcean. I'm also running other nostr services in it. For nostr relay the storage requirements are pretty low for the time being. I'll get back to you with how much my relay is consuming.
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