It's amazing how much relay you can run on an 8$/mo vps. nostr21.com just hit 520 simultaneous connections for the first time a few days ago. It gets hammered regularly by aggregators, caching services, cloudflare, vpns, exit nodes, other relays and regular clients without breaking a sweat. Could it eventually be overwhelmed and attacked by trolls or aggressive hungry indexers gone wild? Sure, but that doesn't really get in our way because I'm not trying to be the biggest relay on the planet, simply filling the gap in my local geographical area with a humble little server.

When I started running it back in December I underestimated how much I would like having my own relay nearby. It's always the first to answer me when I send an important event like a follow list and meanwhile it can also serve 500+ others at the same time!

This is amazing tech. Doug is a legend for creating strfry. I am taking all I've learned about running it and coding it into relay.tools so that anyone can experience running their own relay no matter how experienced you are with servers.

PV 🌴