Cardano nodes:

Cardano is probably one of most decentralized blockchains around. The main driving force to this state is its Ouroboros consensus mechanism, due to its nature staking on Cardano is fairly easy, there are no lockup periods and your tokens can be moved at will while staked. 

Earning stake rewards on Cardano can be achieved through delegating your stake to a pool or providing one to blockchain. The latter is more lucrative but it comes with few responsibilities. Nodes operate in chain in order to maintain transactions and transfer data. Despite requiring a bit of knowledge operating and setting up a Cardano node is a easy and not expensive.

Minimal hardware requirements:

• Min 2 vCPU - 1.6GHz or faster 
• 16GB of RAM.
• 100 GB of disk space (Ideally SSD)
• At least 10Mbps internet connection.

- provided by google.

After a quick google search I did some math and owning your own node shouldn't cost more than 100$, which by blockchain nodes standard is very low.

Comparing it to some of the top POS(Proof of Stake) blockchains:

Solana:

• Min 12 vCPU - 2.8GHz or faster 
• 128GB of RAM or more.
• 500+ GB of disk space (Ideally NVME SSD)
• Min. 300Mbps Preferably 1Gbps internet connection.

Ethereum:

• Min 4 vCPU 
• 16GB of RAM.
• 1 TB of disk space (Ideally SSD)
• At least 25Mbps internet connection.

Polkadot:

• Min 4 vCPU - 3.4GHz or faster 
• 16GB of RAM.
• 1 TB of disk space (Ideally NVME SSD)
• Min. 500Mbps internet connection.

So what happened on Cardano?

An incident which caused approximately 60% of Cardano connected nodes to disconnect from mainchain happened at 00:09:00 UTC, between blocks   8300569 and 8300570.

Affected nodes reconnected automatically, restoring full power of network in less than hour. 

During the outage network was fully operational and due to specific hour of problems there was no real problem with using it.

In 6 years of Cardano operating there was no similar event and hearing explanation from IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson - there shouldn't be more such events in close future.

At the end i wanted to provide you a link to github repository so you if you are interested in whole topic you can gather more information straight from the source:

https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/issues/4826

Hello everyone.

I'm very excited of writing my first article, I hope you will enjoy. Please leave feedback and enter the discussion in comments.