Setting up an Agoric Testnet Validator was a pretty straightforward process. I had already been running a validator on the devnet and the testnet instructions were identical except for using a different version of the Agoric SDK and different chain parameters.
Following this excellent guide from the Agoric team worked like a charm — https://gist.github.com/dckc/c6d4c5800daca0bd3439aee3e024b317
Hardware Requirements
I chose to host my Agoric node on Contabo, a German-based hosting service due to their costs and reputation. The Agoric node requirements are fairly low, requiring only around 1.5 GB of RAM and ~20 GB of hard disk space currently. It can be run economically on a VPS S instance from Contabo.
Warnings
The major issue to watch out for when setting up a node are making sure you don’t do something which inadvertently gets your stake slashed.
When setting up my node, I noticed I needed to power it down temporarily to install Prometheus monitoring. However, I naively just stopped the systemd process instead of letting the network know I was taking my validator offline, resulting in 2% slash of my stake.
I believe that the validator can be safely removed from the network without slashing using ag-cosmos-helper tx staking edit-validator, but will need to confirm with the Agoric team.