...snip...
I suppose the crux of my questioning on efficiency revolves around storage of the blockchain and the experiences of bitcointalk users storing the blockchain in an external HDD and SSD. It would seem due to the continuous requirement of read/write access, using a SSD is almost always better performance wise. In order to have a forward-compatible node, we would need a SSD of at least 350 GB at this point.
Someone here made the comment that a full node shouldn't be hosted in the cloud in the very place but should only be hosted on hardware that you actually own and can physically access. I tend to agree with the observation that if you are using someone else's hardware than it is not truly YOUR node. In terms of efficiency, it seems in the long run it would actually be most cost-efficiency to pony up the costs for hardware that you yourself host locally, and in the case of storage, this would require a SSD of at least 350 GB - might as well buy 1 TB while you are at it.
Thank you all for your input.
Sure. SSD is the way to go.
However,
"Stop saying the cloud is just someone else's computer - because it's not" ...
-
https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-saying-the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer-because-its-not/Many "cloud" hosts will now let you upload or run your own custom and/or fully encrypted OS, for example.
In terms of your "home" node, did you build it from scratch using only "trusted" Open Hardware and Open Source Software ?
Did you review all of the Source Code in it's entirety before you ran it ? Etc., etc.,
