reply on: Question for everyone who runs a lightning node \ stacker news ~lightning

pull down to refresh

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sasasuina 9h \ on: Question for everyone who runs a lightning node lightning

I'm learning about Lightning and hope to run a 24/7 online node on my server one day. Here's what I found about the server costs.

Chapter 5 of the book Mastering the Lightning Network mentions that the cost would be $20–$40 per month.

Virtual private server (VPS) and cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or DigitalOcean are quite affordable and can be set up very quickly. A Lightning node can be hosted for between $20 and $40 per month on such a service.

However, according to my own calculations, it would cost more.

I plan to run lightning node software (LND or Core Lightning), and Bitcoin Core. These programs have modest CPU and memory requirements—2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM are sufficient. The biggest cost is storage, as you need to store the entire Bitcoin blockchain data, which is approximately 630GB as of now, and grows by about 60GB per year. The Lightning Network itself requires very little storage space; reserving a few dozen GBs is sufficient.

For instance, we can choose AWS t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM), which is $40 per month. And we can choose 1TB SSD (gp3) for storage, which is $100 per month. If you need a public IP, there will be another $4 per month. So the total server cost is $144 per month.

I don't know whether there is a way to avoid the storage of Bitcoin blockchain. Or maybe there are some sort of paid service? If we can reduce that cost to for example $10 per month, then the total cost would be $54 per month.