Lightning Network Routing Node Hosting in Romania

Lightning routing revenue depends on three factors: liquidity capital deployed, channel topology quality, and uptime. We cannot do anything about the first two for you - those are your channel management decisions. We can guarantee the third. Our Romania routing nodes target 99.95% monthly uptime on dual power, dual upstream networks.

Directionally, routing nodes with 500M sats deployed and well-balanced inbound liquidity see 5,000-30,000 sats monthly in fees in current market conditions. We make no promise about specific numbers (routing is a competitive market) but the infrastructure is sized to let you compete on uptime.

LND's bbolt-backed channel.db can grow to 5-50GB depending on channel count and HTLC throughput. Slow storage causes HTLC timeouts and force-closes that cost real money. We use the same NVMe class as our Bitcoin Full Node plan for the channel.db filesystem.

For CLN (Core Lightning) the database is more compact but equally latency-sensitive on the WAL. NVMe gives sub-100us fsync, which keeps your node responsive during HTLC bursts.

1TB NVMe holds the Bitcoin chain plus channel state with room to grow. 16GB RAM, 4 dedicated CPU cores. 1Gbps unmetered network.

LND is the most widely deployed implementation, has the largest plugin ecosystem (ThunderHub, RTL, LNBits, Pool, Loop) and excellent documentation. We provision LND by default.

CLN (Core Lightning, from Blockstream) has more rigorous testing, supports MPP and dual-funded channels natively, and pairs well with rust-based tooling. We will provision CLN on request and provide a working bitcoind RPC wire-up.

Eclair and LDK are available for advanced users but require self-managed setup.

Tor-only routing nodes are private but lose 10-30% of routing volume to clearnet-only peers. Hybrid (Tor + clearnet) is the sweet spot for most operators. We expose a single IPv4 plus configure a Tor hidden service so peers can reach you via either path.

If you need pure Tor-only (no clearnet listen), we can disable IPv4 inbound at the firewall. Outbound clearnet still happens for Bitcoin peer connections, since Tor-only Bitcoin is dramatically slower and not recommended for a routing node.

If you already have an LND node on Voltage, Umbrel, MyNode or START9 and want to migrate to dedicated offshore infrastructure, we walk you through a safe migration. Steps: pause routing, drain HTLCs, copy channel.db plus seed plus macaroons, validate state on the new node, swap DNS or .onion, resume forwarding. Total downtime typically 30-90 minutes with no force closes.

See also: Bitcoin + Lightning overview, ThunderHub dashboard guide, live pricing.