Running a ~$200/m Farcaster Hub

We've determined Google Cloud to be a great source of cost control for Farcaster Hubs with a plethora of credits. Alternatives include dedicated servers such as Hivelocity (source).

1. Open a Google Cloud Account with Credits

Start at cloud.google.com to open an account with $300 credits to start. They also have a Web3 Startup Program to earn thousands of more credits. Note this information is from 2024, so credit availability could change.

2. Start a `e2-standard-2` instance

Navigate to Compute Engine from the top search bar and configure an e2-standard-2 instance, with 4 vCPUs with 16GB of memory and 250 GB of SSD persistance. This should be ~$200. Make sure to select Ubuntu LTS as the boot image when configuring SSD persistance.

3. Configure your Firewall

Navigate to Firewall from the top search bar and click Create Firewall Rule.
We need to create two rules, farcaster-ingress and farcaster-egress:

Rule Name	Direction	Targets	Destination Filters	Protocols and Ports
`farcaster-ingress`	Ingress	All instances in the network	Source IPv4 ranges: 0.0.0.0/0	tcp:22,2281,2282,2283,3000
`farcaster-egress`	Egress	All instances in the network	Source IPv4 ranges: 0.0.0.0/0	tcp:80,443,2281,2282,2283,3000

4. Start Your Hub!

Install the gcloud cli or use the ssh button.

Then, run the following command which will walk you through installation, or follow the Hubble guide:

curl -sSL https://download.thehubble.xyz/bootstrap.sh | bash

You'll be able to access your hub with the external IP found on your compute instance.

5. Using Your Hub

For monitoring through Grafana, navigate to your external ip at port 3000, or see this guide on additional configuration.

To submit messages to your hub, see the submitMessage HTTP API.

Congrats on running your hub! This guide is open-source so feel free to update it!

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Free Hubs

If you want to connect to a free hub, check out our Developer Guide!