If you’re a freshman in the Masternode sphere, you might be wondering why everyone recommends using a VPS (Virtual Private Server) to host your Masternode. You have probably observed that most official guides talk only about cold/hot setups. Well, it’s pretty easy to explain: convenience.
There are a few reasons why people chose to use a VPS instead of their local machines.
Let’s take a look at some of them:
1. DDOS (Distributed Denial-Of-Service) Protection – This is one of the most common attacks on Masternodes. An attacker can target a victim (a server in this case) and overwhelm their machine with fake traffic (also known as a zombie attack). This attack clogs the incoming traffic to your server by forcing it out of the blockchain network. Since it doesn’t have a stable connection and it is missing blocks more often than expected. VPS providers have automated services which block these connections, keeping your Masternode safe.
2. Price (it’s cheaper) – This may vary depending on where you live in but on average it costs less to use a VPS than your old local machine at home. Let me explain:
- No need to think about electricity – Of course an old machine won’t use that much power to begin with. It would cost the same amount of money for electricity to cover your monthly rent for the VPS. Have in mind that being a Masternode requires you to stay 24/7 in order to avoid missing an award.
- No internet splitting – This could be a problem for some of you. Most VPS providers have a ridiculously high bandwidth cap which is way more than you need for a simple Masternode hosting. By using a VPS, you don’t need to worry about reaching your monthly bandwidth cap or having to increase your internet plan just to match with your Masternode download / upload requirements. As you’ve may heard, this is a common problem in Australia but also affects other countries as well.
3. Investments – It makes more sense to rent a VPS instead of buying a machine to use as a Masternode. If you already have an old machine which has enough resources to run as a Masternode, you still need to pay the electricity and spare the bandwidth (which we covered above).
4. Maintenance & Support – The VPS provider does all the maintenance behind the scene. You don’t need to take care of anything hardware related. You receive announcements when serious bugs have been noticed (Operating system related bugs) and usually offer you a guide on how to act when something goes wrong. There’s also a 24/7 support option which can help you with every problem you’re experiencing.
5. Quantity of Masternodes – You could run two or three Masternodes on same local machine depending on the resources it has. Imagine having more than fifty different types of Masternodes – you can’t practically use a local machine to store all of them. In addition, having more than one Masternodes on the same machine is complicated to configure. There is a reason why in every guide it’s recommended to use a static IP per each Masternode.
These are only a few of the advantages you can profit when using a VPS, compared to having a local machine running your Masternodes. There are a few more factors like heat, noise, place, and so on.
There are few VPS providers we could recommend at this moment:
- Vultr – The most common VPS provider used for Masternode hosting. You can also pay with Bitcoin.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- DigitalOcean