What are the reasons for running a full node on a VPS? How can I do this?

Question

I've seen some people say they run full nodes on a VPS. What are the reasons for doing this and how might I do it too?

Answer 1

What are the reasons for doing this

First, a full node hosted on a VPS ensures high uptime. If you run a node on a personal computer, you will likely only run it partially, because you turn your computer off from time to time. Higher uptime is better for the network. However, ideally, such a node would run off a personal computer instead of a VPS. There's always an aspect of centralization with respect to VPS providers which people have to keep in mind when making such a decision.

Additionally, people might find it more convenient to run their node on a VPS.

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and how might I do it too?

There's a guide on the official website:

monerod

monerod is the daemon software that ships with the Monero tree. It is a console program, and manages the blockchain. While a bitcoin wallet manages both an account and the blockchain, Monero separates these: monerod handles the blockchain, and simplewallet handles the account.

This guide assumes you have already set up your VPS account and are using SSH to tunnel into the server console.

Linux, 64-bit (Ubuntu 14.04)

Make sure that port 18080 is open

monerod uses this port to communicate with other nodes on the Monero network.

Example if using ufw: sudo ufw allow 18080

Example if using iptables: sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 18080 -j ACCEPT

Download the current Monero Core binaries

wget https://downloads.getmonero.org/linux64

Make a directory and extract the files.

mkdir monero tar -xjvf linux64 -C monero

Launch the daemon

cd monero ./monerod

Options:

Show list of all options and settings:

./monerod --help

Launch the daemon as a background process:

./monerod --detach

Monitor the output of monerod if running as daemon:

tail -f ~/.bitmonero/bitmonero.log

Answer 2

In addition to the issues of uptime and convenience that dEBRUYNE mentioned, another reason for running a node on a VPS could be that you want to run a service that utilizes a Monero wallet, but you don't have the infrastructure to support a wallet processing a lot of transactions, then you can use a VPS to scale the hardware and bandwidth as needed.