I do absolutely admire the Start9 Server One but with my recent experience with my server what do you think about running 2 nodes in case one nodes goes poof?
As you are aware I’m really not sure what caused the Server but I have a sneaky suspicion that I shut it down wrong. I unplugged it from power straight way. I didn’t even notice the button on the front of it btw- I owned it for almost 1.5 years and just thought that cute little round thing was a logo.
Anyhoo…Server One’s (out of stock at Start9) and Pure Servers are pretty expensive but not out of reach BUT if have a PC (yuk, pew, ack) siting behind me that I used for VFX work. It is a pretty healthy machine with 3 SSD’s in it , 32G (speed 2400 Mhz) and I believe a 4 core i7-6700k 4.0Ghz. Would something like that be “okish” for a node or you think a mini is the way to go if I was not able to swing a Pure. One thought I have about the PC is it’s 450 watt power supply…an awful lot for a node.
btw - I’m going to read your other post you have here on the forums to gleam more about it…I veered off topic a bit so I guess really my question is…2 nodes? Good idea? A waste?
I don’t think it is a waste. The benefit of having two is that you can use one for your primary server (with your lightning nodes, in particular, which may have substantial value tied up in them), from which you take frequent backups. The second server is a minimal setup (just Knots, Electrs, Mempool, and Datum Gateway, for example) which sits there fully synced to the blockchain, indexed, and ready to restore backups to in the case of catastrophic falure of the primary server. This gives you a path to quick recovery in a situation where your primary server could not be revived using the simple Recover path.
In such a catastrophy, it means your lightning nodes will not be down for an extended period of time while you wait for a replacement to arrive and then for the IBD and Electrs indexes to finish syncing before you can re-enable them. Besides lightning nodes, this can also be useful for other things which have complex setups or value tied up in them (such as BTC Pay Server, for example). And it can also be used to add redundacy if you use your servers to backup files from other devices on your network (i.e. 2 copies of backups instead of 1), using Syncthing for example.