Hosting

List of ISPs: https://marinade.finance/app/network/isps/?countries=&direction=descending&sorting=stake

Bare Metal

• Interserver
  • 7443p 256GB 2TB SSD + 2x2TB HVMe for $600/month
• Cherry services
  • 7443p 256GM 3x1TB NVMe $775 first month, $668 after.
• Latitude
  • Out of stock
• Teraswitch
  • Out of stock
• Reliablesite
  • Out of stock
• Lumen
• WebNX
  • They require to contact their sales department for customization.
• Equinix
  • Out of stock
• Edgevana
  • I think it was founded by Solana.
  • Most suitable for SFDP
  • Out of stock for reasonable pricing.
• OVHCloud
  • They are black-holing Solana Validators thinking that they are being DDOSes.

Cloud

• Google Cloud Pricing
  • VM Instance Pricing
    • Compute engine price calculator: the n2-highmem-16 Regular Compute Engine with 16 vCPU (2 threads per core), 128 GB memory and 500GB SSD is $850.12 / month.
  • Network Pricing
    • Google VM-to-VM in same zone, same region using internal IPv4: free
    • Google VM-to-VM in diff zone of the same region: $0.01 / GiB
    • Network data transfer from Google cloud to North America $0.11 / GiB.
  • Cloud Storage Pricing
    • 10 TB of Standard Storage in Iowa region is $186.6 / month

Hardware

• Optimal Solana HW from Zan

  My thoughts:
  - TR 3960X has been working for me for three years without any issue, and appears to *still* have headroom.  THREE YEARS.
  - TR 7960X is the generational upgrade to 3960X and I would tentatively brand it "the best Solana CPU".
  - EDIT: Forgot to mention that TR PRO 7965WX is essentially the same processor with better memory support, so that would be great too
  - However TR is not as readily available as rented hardware.  Most use EPYC.
  - Given this, EPYC 9274F would likely be the best EPYC processor for Solana
  - However, it's not nearly as available and more expensive than the fleets of older/cheaper EPYC out there
  - For older/cheaper, EPYC 74F3 seems best, but I believe it's the choice with the far least headroom for the future