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Nostr Relay VPS in Iceland for Decentralized Social Hosting
Nostr is the open decentralized protocol for social and communication apps that has gained traction as a censorship resistant alternative to centralized platforms. Running a relay in Iceland combines the Nostr protocol architecture with a jurisdiction that protects intermediary operators. Anubiz Host runs NVMe KVM in Reykjavik tuned for Nostr relay workloads (strfry, nostr-rs-relay).
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Nostr Protocol and Relay Operation
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a simple protocol where clients publish signed events to relays and read events from relays. Relays are independent servers that store and forward events. Anyone can run a relay. For users in censored jurisdictions, having a wide diversity of relays in friendly jurisdictions matters for protocol resilience. Iceland relays add jurisdictional diversity to the global Nostr relay network.
Relay Implementation and Resources
Strfry is the high performance C++ implementation widely deployed for production relays. Nostr-rs-relay is the Rust implementation. Both handle thousands of concurrent WebSocket connections on modest hardware. A relay serving a few thousand users fits in 2 GB RAM with light CPU. A public open relay serving tens of thousands of users needs 4 to 8 GB RAM with attention to LMDB or SQLite storage tuning. NVMe storage matters for event database performance.
Anubiz Host Iceland Nostr Plans
Mini at 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM at 8 USD per month for personal or small community relay. Standard at 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM at 16 USD per month for medium community. Pro at 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM at 32 USD per month for large public relay. Premium at 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM at 55 USD per month for top tier public relay with many connections. NVMe storage with high IOPS.
Paid Relay and Spam Mitigation
Open public relays face spam from cheap event publication. Many relay operators charge a small Lightning payment for write access to mitigate spam. This works well with the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem and aligns with Iceland's hosting culture of crypto friendly infrastructure. For private community relays, configure write access through a list of allowed npubs. Read access generally remains open. Iceland jurisdiction protects the operator from arbitrary takedown attempts.
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Why Anubiz Host
100% async — no calls, no meetings
Delivered in days, not weeks
Full documentation included
Production-grade from day one
Security-first approach
Post-delivery support included
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