I serve my blog from a small (read: weedy) VPS. I only intended to use it for a simple webserver, so it didn't need to be a beast: Less than a gigabyte of memory. Less than 10 Gb of disk storage, and barely enough CPU to decide what I should eat for breakfast. It's weaker than a raspberry pi, but costs me only a few dollars each month to maintain.

After reading BIP157/158 and learning about how Neutrino works, I thought: "Holy guacamole, what an amazing age we live in. I've got to try this."

I've run Lightning nodes before, but they were always backed by a full archival Bitcoin Core instance, with hundreds of gigabytes of storage required for the full chain and index. This time, I wanted to have a go at running an ultra-light lnd instance on my puny little VPS with as tiny a storage footprint as possible.

Turns out, it's very possible, and took only 2 hours to set up from the time I sat down to read docs/guides, to the time I opened the node's first channel. And most of that was just the reading. With a neutrino backend, LND only took maybe 2 minutes to sync and finish setup. If i were so inclined, I could probably script this process deploy a node and open a channel in 5 minutes tops.

This is sublime. Running a lightning node has never been easier or cheaper.