Let’s say you run a restaurant or brewery and you want to be able to accept thousands of dollars worth of payments everyday on lightning. Would it be best to for that business to simply run their own node and have LSPs open channels to it? I wonder what the cutoff is for safely running a cloud node.
If you are running a big node, or a routing node, do it yourself on your own hardware, if possible.. here is our guide for Docker-enjoyers... https://docs.megalithic.me/category/should-i-run-a-lightning-node ... BUT .. if you are dealing with smaller amounts or want to optimize for uptime & reliability, running a node in the cloud with nostr:npub1jluy3twvf338v6zlujzzdhjkzjy8ezj34ksydr8vw8a6jwp89ygshpp2kq or Alby Cloud is the way to go.... very few home internet connections are fast enough to provide low-latency inbound zaps, and most home internet connections are not really online 24/7... and you need to be online 24/7 to receive lightning payments!
Discussion
That’s outside my experience, so I’ll let the experts advise, but I wouldn’t run that setup on a home node personally.
I'd say go cloud for any professional service, unless your devops is very tight. For the brewery usecase you're likely operating clearnet.
Agreed. Just don't treat your cloud node as "savings". Withdraw the sats from it a couple times per month or something and put them in cold storage.
In lnbits we have the boltz extension, which you can set to loop out every x sats. Limits risk, keeps channels healthy 🤌
Testing for this note… we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at benarc@nostr.com, over a period of 25 minutes. All six attempts were successful. Please check on your end to be sure you received. Average zap time was 4310ms (4.3 seconds). We consider this zap time slow... generally, zaps should complete in under two seconds. (Other Nostr users might think your zaps are broken, might not zap you again.) We recommend you receive zaps with a well-connected, cloud-based Lightning node to reduce your latency.
Pretty hard question to answer. Actually running your own node from scratch is serious heavy lifting, only for developers. But running you own node on Alby Cloud or Rizful.com is pretty easy.
If it was me; I’d start with the people at BTCPayServer and work from there.