Earnings - how does it work?

Storage Node Operators
#1

Hi!

I run a small node of ~1 TB more for fun than for profit, it’s just some old equipment that would not be used anyway so why not. I also have 1 Gb/s internet speed, no limit for bandwidth. I enjoyed setting node up, maintaining, monitoring it - it gives me a bit of new experience in using CLI, etc.

But still the question - I see people posting their earnings and those are far bigger than mine (and those people are still complaining it’s too low… :slight_smile:). I also get barely no traffic after vetting process was complete, e.g. so far this month egress is 37.30 GB.

So, do earnings depend on location - i.e. once files someone upload are cut into pieces, is there a higher chance that if client is from US, data will be split between nodes in US and I will not get a piece, or is it completely random?

I ask this because if that is true, I assume that if there are less or no clients at all in my location / region / continent, that would mean less or no earnings compared to same node with better location.

At the same moment, if my node coincidentally stores pieces of files that are just stored and never downloaded, I would also get no earnings.

Maybe even my disk I/O speed matters here? Or not?

#2

Hi let me see if I can answer your question.

You should expect to see payments primarily for storing data and allowing customers to download (egress) data. Having more storage increases how much you get paid and the likelihood or more downloads. Storj has a hold back mechanism that retains some of your payments for a while to ensure that customer data is retained for long periods and not lost. You can run an earnings script to see the details. Your nodes ability to quickly respond to requests will affect whether you get data more quickly than others, so distance has an impact, however I am in the US and see decent traffic (I currently am holding about 12 TB of data with capacity for 35 TB total spread across three nodes. The first one was brought online in December 2019. My egress this month is around 700 GB so far.

Please go to this calculator (best to copy it to your own Google Docs account to modify it for your situation:

#3

How old is your node? do you have data there from stefen-benten? If yes, then you can make GE and get fresh data, as stefen-benten today not use this data(do not download it at all)

#4

I don’t recommend exiting that satellite as the owner has hinted it would be repurposed. It may help short term, but you might be missing out long term.

1 Like
#5

Thanks. Node is not old, just 3rd month online (I hade one previously but it got corrupted so had to go with fresh reinstall…).

I use earnings.py and I know about the “held” part of the payments. Still, I wonder even if I expanded it to be 35 TB like you @stuberman have - would I benefit from it at all. Here are my numbers since 1st of June.

image
image1803×701 37.6 KB

1 Like
#6

Hah, nice to see the estimated earnings graphed like that. You can see the clear influence of the intermittent updates of used storage especially earlier in the month.

#7

I hold 9TB of data and that makes more or less $1 a day but node is full. From what i read this seems a correct amount of earnings. if you’ve got a 1tb node that is full id expect it to earn about $3.50 a month there or there about’s. Obviously if your lucky enough to upload a large amount of that back to customer then earnings will be increased.

#8

Love the graph.

I’ve been running one node since the start of V3 and another I started a couple of months ago. in total I’ve 8Tb of storage across both nodes and i’ve less than 0.5Tb of space left total and my income is roughly $0.90 per day.

#9

That graph looks nice !
Do you have a scrips that generates it ? I’d be very much interested in trying it out.

#10

It’s one-liner in bash, parsing output of earnings.py and all is sent & displayed in Zabbix :slight_smile: