The question of true Shakespeare from the Solana era: bare metal or cloud? And each team has its own brew of this concoction. Today, we have a story about Magneta Labs, which has also faced this choice head-on: how to build a dedicated node cluster that’s both cost-efficient and performant, without getting locked into expensive hyperscaler contracts?
The answer required understanding the true cost of running Solana nodes and making deliberate infrastructure choices. Evaluating the top Solana RPC providers revealed that most solutions prioritize convenience over economics. Building a custom cluster meant taking control of the hardware layer.
The Economics of Solana Nodes
Take a sheet of paper, we’ll have a bit of calculations here. A single node consumes around 80TB of bandwidth monthly—40TB inbound, 40TB outbound. Add in the RAM requirements for indexing, the CPU demands of block validation, and the need for fast, reliable storage, and you’re looking at serious infrastructure costs.
Public cloud providers price this workload aggressively. A compute-optimized instance on GCP with 512GB RAM and sufficient storage runs $3,398 per month. Azure is similar at $3,878. AWS comes in at $3,857. These prices assume you’re comfortable with their terms of service and willing to accept the risk of unexpected service termination due to blockchain-related policy changes.
Bare metal servers from OVHcloud offered a different equation. The same specs—512GB RAM, 64 vCPUs, fast NVMe storage, and unmetered bandwidth—cost $1,364.99 per month. That’s a 60% cost reduction. More importantly, OVHcloud explicitly supports blockchain infrastructure and can provision replacement hardware in 1–2 days if something fails.
The bandwidth difference alone justifies the choice. OVHcloud provides 1Gbit/s unmetered public bandwidth and 25Gbit/s private bandwidth. Cloud providers charge per GB of outbound traffic. At Solana’s bandwidth requirements, those charges become prohibitive.
The RAM Challenge
Solana nodes don’t have fixed RAM requirements. It depends on which RPC methods you plan to support. The getProgramAccounts and getTokenAccountsByOwner methods require 512GB. If you add getTokenAccountsByDelegate and getTokenLargestAccounts, you’re looking at 1.5TB. Supporting all four methods simultaneously demands 2TB of RAM.
Most cloud providers can’t provision 2TB of RAM without custom configurations and significant cost increases. OVHcloud’s bare metal servers come standard with 512GB and can be configured up to 2TB. This flexibility is essential when you don’t know your exact requirements upfront.
The Hybrid Architecture
The solution wasn’t pure bare metal. Solana nodes need orchestration, load balancing, persistent storage for monitoring data, and automated deployment pipelines. These workloads fit better on cloud infrastructure. The hybrid approach made sense: bare metal for the compute-intensive Solana nodes, public cloud for Kubernetes control planes, load balancers, and monitoring systems.
This hybrid model combines the raw power and cost efficiency of bare metal with the operational flexibility of cloud services. You get the performance you need where it matters and the agility you need for orchestration.
The Infrastructure Stack
The team implemented a comprehensive solution built on several key components. Kubernetes served as the container orchestration layer, with Helm charts for deploying Solana nodes consistently across the cluster. GitHub Actions automated the build pipeline for Solana container images. Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics collected monitoring data and triggered alerts. Grafana Loki and Promtail handled log aggregation and analysis.
The architecture also required private networking between bare metal servers and cloud instances, allowing the cluster to communicate securely without exposing nodes to the public internet. OVHcloud’s private network feature made this straightforward.
Cost Comparison: The Numbers
| Provider | Monthly Cost | Bandwidth | RAM | Storage |
| OVHcloud | $1,364.99 | 1Gbit/s unmetered | 512GB | 2x 3.84TB NVMe |
| GCP | $3,398.19 | Metered (expensive) | 512GB | 7.68TB |
| Azure | $3,878.40 | 5GB free, then metered | 512GB | 8.19TB |
| AWS | $3,857.79 | Metered ($102.40/TB) | 512GB | 7.68GB |
The cost difference compounds over time. Running a three-node cluster for a year costs $49,140 on OVHcloud versus $122,000+ on cloud providers. That’s a $70,000+ annual savings. For a startup or mid-sized team, that difference is runway.
The Operational Reality
Cost savings mean nothing if the infrastructure is unreliable or requires constant firefighting. The hybrid approach addressed this. Bare metal servers handle the heavy lifting with predictable performance. Cloud instances handle orchestration and monitoring, which can scale up or down as needed. If a bare-metal server fails, OVHcloud can provision a replacement within 1–2 days. The Kubernetes layer automatically redistributes workloads during that window.
Monitoring became comprehensive. Prometheus collects metrics from every layer. Grafana dashboards provide visibility into node health, RPC latency, bandwidth usage, and sync status. Loki aggregates logs from all nodes, making it easy to debug issues across the cluster.
No Clear Answers, But Clear Measurements
For analytics platforms, trading infrastructure, or DeFi protocols building on Solana infrastructure costs directly impact the runway. A $70,000 annual savings is significant. But the real win is control; that’s the sign of growth. When your project requires new things of the utmost importance, it’s time to become more independent, released from the cloud provider’s blockchain policies. You own the hardware and rule it.
The hybrid approach also scales better. Adding a new Solana node means provisioning bare metal and letting Kubernetes handle the rest.