I was thinking of hosting my own node. I have a fast Amazon AWS server, however not enough storage to host a full node. What I was thinking, is to host a full node on the AWS client, but get it to store and write to a blockchain on a different database server, where storage is cheaper.
Is this possible? Or is this not classified as a full node?
If you are running bitcoind on a VPS it will expect the blockchain to be stored on the local disk. You could setup a remote file system using NFS or SMB but this will probably slow down the node and make it less responsive. Amazon already has one of the cheapest cost's for storage why not just increase the size of the drive? If you are talking about moving the blockchain from disk and storing it in a database that cannot be done without modifying the bitcoin source code.
Nope it's no longer a full node since peers can not download the full blockchain from you. However some, including core devs, will still refer to pruned nodes as full nodes. Since 0.12.0 and BIP130, blocks can be announced by header and pruned nodes can serve the blocks they have.
How much storage do you have available? Do you have over 2 GB?
Have you looked into running a pruned node? After initial launch of bitcoin core, close it and create a bitcoin.conf file with prune = 550. https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#wallet-pruning
Also take into consideration of bandwidth usage. When I run nodes on a VPS I usually cut the bandwidth too. You can set these in your bitcoin.conf as well using maxuploadtarget and maxconnections.
maxuploadtarget=20
maxconnections=16
This way you can still have a fully functioning Bitcoin wallet but make it more affordable to run a VPS. Again it's not a full node, but it will have full functionality for running bitcoind on a server.
