I currently run a seed node constellation and with the additional goal of helping hive
related infra, I'll be mirroring the API Node snapshots so that others can easily get up and running with them. Right now only one user hosts, them, @blocktrades and team. I did see interest from one other user for grabbing them and setting up a torrent for them, and if that does get established, I'll link my copies to the torrent as well.
The basic way that this will be run is that the content of the snapshot(a little over 2.5TB as of now) will be mirrored to my own servers, and then served from there(and if @disregardfiat gets the torrent goal done, add these to the torrent). Right now the plan is to mirror to 2 locations, Chicago and San Fransisco. I initially thought of using my own infrastructure in SF, but realized that I would need to upgrade power capacity to add another server, and didn't really have a server that's rented to me that supports hot swap(bad planning on my part) and I don't want to power anything down. I did manage to find a provider who I can work with and send them a drive and they'll rent me a VPS with the drive passed through to it for fairly cheap(I'll be doing some network shenanigans to route everything through my network and access their network via a shared IX to keep the network costs low for them). The timeline for their side is to get this up by late May, so my side should be ready by early June.
For Chicago, the plan to to buy a new server to colocate in a DC that I'm working with to rent space. Having learned from my mistakes, I'll be getting a server that supports hot swap drives this time. To keep costs low, I'll be getting some fairly old hardware, as there isn't a real big need for a very powerful server for this, just something that'll support a decent amount of disk space. Right now I've spec'd out a Supermicro server with Intel Xeon E3-1230v6 CPU(this thing is old, but will do the job just fine), 64 gigs of DDR4 ECC RAM, a 10 TB HDD, a 500 GB SSD for boot and a 10 gbit network card. Without the network card, the price comes to $1669 + tax + shipping, so I'm expecting this to end up costing about $1750 +tax +shipping in the end. There's more work to be done to get Chicago up and running, so this will probably be up around mid July from my initial timelines.
For fetching the data, I'll use lftp(https://github.com/lavv17/lftp) to mirror it to one location, then copy from there to other, but might work with the source of the data(@blocktrades) to see if we can make it more efficient. Alongside the api node snapshot, I plan to put a copy of the block_log there as the only public copy we have right now is hosted in the EU and it's terribly slow to copy to the US, and related files. I'll also get my hive-engine snapshots up once again. Once the US-West mirror is done, I'll make a post.
All of this is self funded so if you would like to support me, please throw a witness vote for @rishi556.