Solana eats hardware for breakfast: hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, NVMe that sustains six-digit IOPS and a network that never blinks. Our DS-4 hits the official validator minimums — anonymously, with 10 Gbps unmetered.
Solana's 400 ms slots and parallel runtime turn every node into a small supercomputer: the accounts database hammers NVMe continuously, snapshots arrive at multi-gigabit speed, and RAM below 256 GB means falling behind the cluster. Most VPS offerings aren't in the conversation. This page maps Solana's official requirements onto bare metal that actually meets them — and onto a testnet tier for learning the ropes without burning validator money.
DS-4: 64 EPYC cores at 3.25 GHz, 256 GB DDR5 ECC, 4× 4 TB NVMe — matching the published validator minimums.
Four NVMe drives let you split ledger, accounts and OS — the layout every serious validator guide assumes.
A voting validator pushes 100+ TB a month. That is a normal Tuesday on our unmetered 10 Gbps uplinks.
Vote and identity keys are yours; the hosting trail is a token. Run infrastructure for a permissionless network permissionlessly.
Realistic sizing for a mainnet node in 2026 — chain size, memory, disk and bandwidth. Based on what actually runs in production, not on minimum specs that stopped being true two years ago.
| Client software | Agave (validator client) |
|---|---|
| Chain size | ledger 1–2 TB (rolling) |
| Growth per year | IOPS-bound — NVMe only |
| Recommended RAM | 256 GB (512 GB for RPC) |
| Recommended storage | 2× NVMe (ledger + accounts) |
| Initial sync | hours (snapshot) |
| Prunable | ✓ (rolling ledger) |
| P2P port | 8000–8020 TCP/UDP |
Every plan ships with unlimited bandwidth, NVMe storage and full root access — the three things a node actually consumes. Deploy with a token, pay in the same coin your node secures.
Testnet validators, devnet RPC, indexers and light services — not sized for mainnet consensus, priced for learning.
Official mainnet minimums: entry validator or private RPC node. 512 GB and custom builds available on request for heavy RPC.
| Location | CPU | RAM | Storage | Uplink | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moldova Budget Offshore | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $220.00/mo | Order |
| Russia Western-Proof | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $220.00/mo | Order |
| Panama No Data Retention | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $244.50/mo | Order |
| Romania Anti-Retention | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $244.50/mo | Order |
| Netherlands Best Peering | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $259.00/mo | Order |
| Iceland Free Speech Haven | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $279.00/mo | Order |
| Switzerland Premium Privacy | 64C / 128T 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (3.25 GHz) 2× |
256 GB DDR5 ECC | 4x 4TB NVMe | 10 Gbps | $293.50/mo | Order |
Need more disk, RAM or a custom RAID layout for your node? Contact →
From order to synced node. Commands are copy-paste ready for Ubuntu 24.04 — adapt paths if you run Debian or Rocky.
Netherlands for peering density, or Iceland for clean cheap power under an indifferent jurisdiction.
Mount ledger and accounts on separate NVMe drives, raise file-descriptor limits, set the CPU governor to performance.
One installer script pins the current release; verify it and add the binaries to PATH.
sh -c "$(curl -sSfL https://release.anza.xyz/stable/install)"
export PATH="/root/.local/share/solana/install/active_release/bin:"Pull the latest snapshot from known validators and start agave-validator in RPC mode — or with your vote account if you're joining consensus.
# mount ledger and accounts on separate NVMe drives
agave-validator \
--ledger /mnt/ledger --accounts /mnt/accounts \
--limit-ledger-size 50000000 \
--only-known-rpc --no-voting # RPC modesolana catchup confirms you're at the head; wire the monitor output into your alerting. Validators: fund the vote account and watch your credits.
solana catchup --our-localhost
agave-validator --ledger /mnt/ledger monitorThe published minimums for a voting validator: 24+ high-clock cores, 256 GB RAM, separate NVMe for ledger and accounts, 1 Gbps minimum bandwidth with 10 recommended. RPC nodes servicing real traffic want 512 GB to 1 TB RAM and even more NVMe. The rolling ledger self-prunes (--limit-ledger-size), so disk is about IOPS and parallelism more than raw capacity — four independent NVMe devices beat one big one every time.
A validator earns inflation commission and priority-fee share on the stake it attracts — and pays roughly 1 SOL per day in vote fees regardless. Break-even therefore depends on attracting delegation, not on hardware alone. What hardware does control is skip rate: a DS-4 at spec with 10 Gbps keeps your produced-block rate competitive, so the stake you attract compounds instead of leaking. Start on testnet with the Starter tier, prove your operations, then commit.
Public Solana RPCs are rate-limited to uselessness for bots, indexers and serious dapps. A private RPC node — no voting, known peers only, full account index if you need it — answers getProgramAccounts without quotas and keeps your query patterns (your strategy) off shared infrastructure. For trading workloads, pair it with our Netherlands location for the lowest ping to the major peering hubs.
Agave releases land frequently: follow the release feed and restart in your low-traffic window — restarts resume from local state in minutes. Watch disk wear: the accounts NVMe takes sustained writes, and we swap drives proactively on SMART signals. Snapshots make disaster recovery boring — any fresh DS-4 is back at the cluster head in hours. Keep identity and vote keys backed up off-box; they are the only unrecoverable part.
No — 128 GB RAM is below mainnet spec and we won't pretend otherwise. DS-3 is the right box for testnet validation, devnet work and light RPC. Mainnet consensus starts at DS-4.
Yes, the official minimums: 64 high-clock EPYC cores, 256 GB DDR5 ECC, four independent NVMe drives, 10 Gbps unmetered. Heavy RPC or maximum-performance validation benefits from 512 GB — ask us for a custom build.
Voting validators commonly move 100–200 TB a month combined. RPC nodes vary with traffic. Both are unmetered here — there is no overage line on our invoices.
Snapshot download at 10 Gbps plus catch-up: typically a few hours from bare OS to caught up — not the days a from-genesis sync would take.
Your vote account and stake are on-chain and public by design. What stays private is the operator: hosting under a token, paid in SOL, in a jurisdiction that doesn't correlate. Public infrastructure, private operator.
It's your metal — run Agave, Firedancer or a hybrid as they mature. 64 cores and four NVMe lanes leave room to test both against each other.
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Related reading: VPS vs Dedicated Server for Privacy-Critical Workloads · The First Hour of VPS Hardening: A Checklist · Crypto nodes
DS-4 bare metal: 256 GB ECC, four NVMe drives, 10 Gbps unmetered. Snapshot to cluster head in hours — paid in SOL.