Storj is offering Geofencing to customers. But is this widely used? If so, what is the best region for nodes?
Maybe they can’t say: as it would be telling competitors which markets to focus on? But if customers have the most ingress/egress associated with US1… is that all we need to know?
If I could choose a place to geolocate a node IP… I’d pick a major US city (as someplace that likely has “good Internet” for latency purposes).
Storj folks already openly say they need more nodes in South America.
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That’s a good point! I guess we need to clarify if we’re talking about the the best region for SNOs (like where they could fill their nodes fastest, or get more egress) vs. what Storj may prefer. The company may want to improve offerings to certain customers in certain geos… perhaps even for purely marketing reasons… but that doesn’t mean that’s where SNOs would make the most money, today.
I would say the best region is the one the physical node is in. This question is only relevant if you have to option to host your actual node in another region. If you’re going to use VPN or other types of additional steps to forward traffic, the negative impact of the additional latency will far outpace the benefit of getting a little more from geofencing. Geofencing is actively discouraged as it will have a negative performance impact for customers. So I don’t imagine many will use it.
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My feeling is just the other way.
European customers might not want their data to be stored in the US because of EU regulations. Both EU and US might avoid russia for obvious reasons. And there is many more…
Yeah, but those same users are also more likely to use the commercial network instead of the public network. But I don’t have numbers to compare.
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I believe some companies don’t want their data hosted in certain areas for reasons. For instance, a Ukranian company might not want their data hosted in Russa. So, it’s often about exclusion rather than regions walled in. But it depends on the company and what they want. There is no list to go to that details what all those rules are, other than what is setup for each customer at the time they sign on for it. I couldn’t tell you what those are.
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I don’t know. I could imagine that for EU-customers the option to store their data EU-only is well sough. But of course I don’t have numbers.
As far as I know the commercial network (currently) only has US-based datacenters. So at the moment it does not (yet) to be an option.
Hm?
How it could be more clear?
The paid Customer have an ability to request the geofencing, which will meet their requirements.
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Meanwhile I did my own Test… No significant difference between US east coast and EU.
This is not what I expected. 
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I’m not surprised. I think most users who would have geofencing restrictions probably also require other security certifications and are likely to use Storj Select. Those on the public network are almost always better off not restricting geographic distribution.
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Geofencing can cancel the whol purpose of Storj, the decentralisation, if it’s done too extreme. But it’s their choise in the end.
Actually, it depends on what is protocol you have used.
If you use uplink CLI, the difference may be significant!
If you use S3, well, the result likely will be the same independently of your physical location, well, almost…
If you would use 64MiB chunks, then likely any connection will be faster (up to 5x), especially if you would use a parallelism and multiple threads, see Hotrodding Decentralized Storage.