Cost-efficient way to setup an IPFS pinning server

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Hi, I’ve searched the forum and discussion over the internet but haven’t found a good answer to my question, so I’m looking for help here. I’d appreciate any help.

My question is, is there a cost-efficient way to setup an IPFS node serving for the purpose of pinning a lot of files? I’m currently doing development using cloud infrastructure only, so using a large size physical disk storage is not an option.

Most storage spaces that directly attach to a VM costs a lot than object storage. For example, the Elastic Block Store on AWS costs way more than S3. For GCP, the compute engine storage also costs more than the Cloud Storage. So when spinning up IPFS pin servers based on cloud infrastructure, using the default file storage is not very cost-efficient and I’m seeking help to see if there’s any good way to reduce the storage cost.

For S3 I know there’s already an IPFS plugin go-ds-s3 that utilize S3 as storage space. But it seems the plugin only supports a single IPFS node (not horizontally scalable) and is only suitable for S3. What about GCP cloud storage or any other cheap storage providers? Is there any well-developed plugin or any other kinds of solution that could help me to setup a low cost IPFS pinning server?

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If you’re optimising for cost efficiency it’s worth considering that bandwidth costs can easily outweigh storage depending on how much traffic you have.

You might be interested in GitHub - elastic-ipfs/elastic-ipfs: A cloud native IPFS node which you can read more about here: New infrastructure, who dis? Elastic IPFS in production for NFT.Storage.

There’s also GitHub - n0-computer/iroh which is designed to be more modular so that you can scale the different components of an IPFS node independently.

You can find a list of IPFS implementations in this docs page IPFS implementations | IPFS Docs which we recently updated.

This doesn’t answer your question directly, but it’s more to point you in the right direction.

Having briefly looked at GitHub - ipfs/go-ds-s3: An s3 datastore implementation, I don’t think it should be too much trouble to build something similar for GCP Cloud Storage. But I also don’t have any operational experience with the s3 plugin.

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