Validator / Collator - Operational Costs

Hello all,

There are two active discussions relating to validatorand collator economics. I would like to engage the community in discussion on the topic of what's fair compensation for each role.

Ultimately I would like to use this information as the basis for requesting funding under a bounty mechanism as described here. The last discussion on the topic of validator compensation was started in January as we tried to establish an initial value for the minimum commission.

The value determined at the time was $680/mth. Since then, cost for hosting has increased, our options for reliable hosts have decreased. Conversely, I believe we can reduce operation man hours. The market has changed and we need to reasonably conserve on spending as well.

I am suggesting that we each post our thoughts on pricing using the template below:

Validator costs:

• Cost for a bare-metal server from a reliable vendor. - [reference host, cost]
• Number of man hours for upgrades - [hrs, rate]
• Fractional share for tooling, this includes for Grafana, PagerDuty and the like - [cost]
• Backup node, [yes/no], [if yes include cost]

Collator costs:

• Cost for a bare-metal server from a reliable vendor. - [reference host, cost]
• Number of man hours for upgrades - [hrs, rate]
• Fractional share for tooling, this includes for Grafana, PagerDuty and the like - [cost]
• Compensation for loss of staking rewards [yes/no]

With your submissions please consider that the operational demands and responsibilities of a validator is higher than that of a collator.

Kind Regards,