You can get raw iron down to that but it takes some scale, wonder if the retail arm chips signal we're off racing to the bottom

arm on hydro power FTW

Tradeoffs...

With a professional cloud service, you're less likely to have a hardware or network issue that costs you sats either in terms of a database corruption or failed payments...

But when running on anyone else's hardware (no matter the configuration, including some nodes as a service that claim otherwise) they could conceivably introspect memory or storage and exfiltrate your keys if they really really wanted to.

The same is true of running a mobile node, Apple/Google ultimately pwn your keys. Same could be said too of closed source desktop/server OS's like Windows and Mac.

There's a lot of solutions out there with theatrical claims of being non-custodial, part of that is virtue signal and part scamming the regulator, but they're still trusted setups.

So the question ultimately becomes then, what is the threshold for theft? Are these massive enterprises with Fortune 100 clients who entrust them with billions of dollars in data going to risk that to sweep your sats? Probably not.

Obviously I wouldn't recommend a cloud or mobile node for cold storage or any life altering amount of money, just as I wouldn't a Windows or Mac system... but in the context of Lightning it's invariably internet connected service and thus a hot wallet. Trusting some enterprise tech providers (ideally with some obscurity*) is a better tradeoff than trusting overtly financial services, especially in terms of disintermediating your income and discovering new income in a circular Lightning economy.

*obscurity: I wouldn't name a VPS "My Bitcoin whale node" or make my username Satoshi, just as I wouldn't use a VPS or hosting provider that explicitly catered to hosting Bitcoin nodes, that's called a honeypot.

There's not a lot of VPS providers that accept Lightning, so the answer is technically none...

That said, it should run on most low-end-box type VPS, I've seen deals at places like Racknerd (that do accept on-chain Bitcoin) for like $20/year that should work.

In my tests it comfortably sits at 1GB of RAM and <2GB of storage... but bursting for restarts etc I recommend 2GB RAM and LND has been known to balloon to 20+GB on disk if it doesn't get restarted for awhile.

I think these ARM based VPS's have a lot of potential, you can't get a whole lot cheaper and there's still headspace as they come with 4GB of RAM... Hetzner is in my experience a very reliable provider as well with a good reputation.

My biggest hesitation talking about Hetz is they do such a good job that they're already a considerable part of the public graph

Good news is I've had some conversations with other big, but still underdog, cloud providers who are showing interest in launching more competitive solutions.

Both Pub and LNbits are intended as independent systems, so that would be nesting them, but it would be possible in either direction with a little effort

On the LNbits side, for it to use Pub, it would need a fairly simple REST client (might work with LNURL already actually?)... going over Nostr would be a little more work. We plan on packaging the wallet client for these kind of things once it settles down.

For the reverse it'd probably be easy about the same, using an LNbits instance like we use another Pub as a bootstrap peer would be a good place to add a LNbits client which is simple REST