Validator / Collator - Operational Costs
Hello all,
There are two active discussions relating to validatorand collator economics. I would like to engage the community in discussion on the topic of what's fair compensation for each role.
Ultimately I would like to use this information as the basis for requesting funding under a bounty mechanism as described here. The last discussion on the topic of validator compensation was started in January as we tried to establish an initial value for the minimum commission.
The value determined at the time was $680/mth. Since then, cost for hosting has increased, our options for reliable hosts have decreased. Conversely, I believe we can reduce operation man hours. The market has changed and we need to reasonably conserve on spending as well.
I am suggesting that we each post our thoughts on pricing using the template below:
Validator costs:
- Cost for a bare-metal server from a reliable vendor. - [reference host, cost]
- Number of man hours for upgrades - [hrs, rate]
- Fractional share for tooling, this includes for Grafana, PagerDuty and the like - [cost]
- Backup node, [yes/no], [if yes include cost]
Collator costs:
- Cost for a bare-metal server from a reliable vendor. - [reference host, cost]
- Number of man hours for upgrades - [hrs, rate]
- Fractional share for tooling, this includes for Grafana, PagerDuty and the like - [cost]
- Compensation for loss of staking rewards [yes/no]
With your submissions please consider that the operational demands and responsibilities of a validator is higher than that of a collator.
Kind Regards,
Comments (19)
Validator Costs:
Collator Costs:
When you have a few nodes it makes sense to deploy ansible which reduces man hours for updates at the expense of the time to craft the scripts. I would also say it's important that validators and collators both run the best quality hardware. A validator running a higher performant system can make up for a less performant collator and vice versa. When the number of transactions on the network starts increasing it will be more important than ever that the hardware have the headroom necessary for larger blocks that require more cpu power. I would recommend that everyone operator their validators and collators on 2300 series intel chips and use less expensive 2200 series as backup nodes.
Hello Paradox,
We support your efforts to give lights on this topic, and would share our validator costs.
We actually run 1 validator on Kusama (active, non involved in 1KV nominations) and 1 on PolkaDot (1KV supported). Totals are referred to monthly costs.
Collators:
We actually run collators on Bifrost chain and Moonbeam chain.
Hope this helps