Surprisingly the terms currently stipulate that you must use a different IP address per node!
We will be changing this.
We want there to be one wallet address per SNO for tax and legal reasons, but we have no problem with SNOs running as many Storage Nodes on as many IPs as they want. It is our job (not the SNOs) to keep the data and network balanced, and our Node selection process continues to have tweaks and improvements from time to time as we discover issues. We have not seen the last of the issues of course, and we will continue to prioritize fixes and adjustments as needed.
It’s worth noting that while we intend to change the SNO T&Cs to allow SNOs to operate more than one Node behind the same IP, the most important things to keep in mind when running multiple nodes are that:
- The network balances load across Nodes and uses IP filtering as part of that process (5 Nodes behind 1 IP will get less traffic than 5 Nodes behind 5 IPs)
- Each Node should have it’s own physical drive. Running multiple Nodes on virtual machines sharing the same physical storage isn’t allowed under the terms. The failure of that hardware would mean the failure of all of the Nodes using that hardware.
- We strongly recommend just using one drive per Node and not investing in RAID or other hardware for redundancy. The network is built to manage redundancy on the software side.