Nostr, I need some help. My home node is not reliable enough for me to finish my paper and research. The hardware is shot.

I need to run a full node of bitcoin core on a VM. AI suggested an AWS EC2 T3.small instance (2gb ram), does this seem reasonable? 1TB storage.

On the same VM I need to pull pretty simple onchain data like block height, block time, block size, block subsidy, block fees, difficulty, cumulative total supply, UTXO count, ect. into a database in which I can compute additional data like energy per block and cumulative energy per block. Is PostgreSQL the right option for this?

Then I just need to build charts/tables from my database to present. I would like for the database and charts to be able to update live as new blocks come in, but it’s not completely necessary.

Am I on the right track here? I have very little programming/data experience. It seems like AI can help me get through most of it, but I just want to know if there is an easier or cheaper way? Looking at like $100/month for this setup currently.

Ultimately this does not need to be sustained long term, just enough to prove the math, concept and visualize the energy of bitcoin for the1st time. The ended game is obviously for block explorers to integrate this; I’m not looking to recreate the wheel. I’ve calculated a ton of early blocks by hand in excel, but I need a program to finish this properly. I really just need block data and not necessarily need a node, but where do you get reliable data from? 🤷‍♂️