Would you be willing to pay $30/month for the following:
I’m using this dedicated server but still with plenty unused disk space and thought that was a good idea to share it. There’s no much slots for now.
Since you’re posting this to the StorJ forum, you could run your own node… Although, I’m not sure if those rates will be cost effective.
Peak earnings from raw storage:
$1.5*8 = $12/month
Peak earnings from 1Tbps with 2TB cap (treating all as client upload, with no overhead, repair, downloads, or deletions):
$20*2 = $40
So, theoretical maximum earnings is $52/month… However, there are several problems with these calculations:
A realistic StorJ profit calculator maintained by the community: Realistic earnings estimator (However, I would expect this case would lead to the calculator over estimating earnings for this case)
This gives me a theoretical earnings of $40/month after running for one year (with the version available today: 2020-11-27T05:00:00Z); however, I believe you will be fairly unlikely to obtain these results.
If you’re already paying for the server, you might as well run your own node on top; but for someone else to give you a guaranteed $30/month for what is actually not very likely to happen… I’d say they are likely better off passing or using it to host some other service, as StorJ is currently unlikely to hit the upload volume needed to make this profitable for a while
Really appreciate your honest answer, Doom!
I’m ~kind of~ already commited with this server and I forgot to mention that I’m already running my own node in one of these servers. Given that I may be able to offer a better deal, specially considering it’s a storage-focused server.
What would you consider a fair pricing? If I may ask.
Would have to be around 10 to 17 per month for it to even remotely profitable or its just not worth it. Its not a good idea to rent from a data center though when we have low data usage it just will not pay for it and you will be paying more for the node then you will make.
I appreciate you mention the date. I’d like to add that earnings have dropped significantly in the last half of this month. My node with 13.3TB of data on it is looking to earn just over $30 this month. If this sustains, I will change the estimator to reflect this. I would say the estimator reflects recent months before the current one, but it’s always an estimation of recent performance and not a prediction of the future.
You’re running a node on this server already or a server like it? And do they share an IP /24 subnet.
Either way, I’m a little confused. You’re trying to rent it out to a SNO? Either they will take a loss on that or you are cheating yourself out of income you could have had running a node on it yourself. What gives?
In this server, with the same configs I’ve mentioned in the initial post.
They don’t I was wondering the same and was able to get IP from different /24 subnets.
You got it right, I was willing to rent to a potential SNO! I was just wondering if I could offer better deals than other storage VPS providers, at least for Storj purposes, but seems to be lose-lose.
EDIT: Also I would like to thank you for you answers, that were pretty insightful! I may come up with a different pricing model later on and will for sure share with you.
Yeah, I was just genuinely wondering what was behind it as it sounds to me like either you are leaving money on the table or the person renting it would be running at a loss. But perhaps I’m missing something.
maybe you should also check all the competition prices first, that will give you a rough estimate of what you can charge…
many VPS providers around, and widely different price ranges and specialized in certain things, but they will have a general range they will rarely exceed expect if they offer something special…
In case you don’t have a non-vetted node. My unvetted node is the only unvetted node in my subnet (I used that storj info link somewhere around here) is getting 1.5GB/day ingress or 45GB/month. I do think due to the correlation of audits and amount stored that it would take 6 weeks to vet at current rates
If you have specifics that feedback is always welcome in the earnings estimator thread. Keep in mind though that vetting speeds up over time as the more data you have the more audits you’ll get. I believe the official word is that it should take about a month but in my experience it’s usually a little shorter on most satellites. The estimator uses an approximation to correct for this in the first month. If it seems off to you, let me know in that thread.
As I’m already commited to the server and plans to fulfill entire 48TB may take months, even years, I thought I could offer some kind of a host deal for remaining disk space.
Although, using earnings estimator, renting it out would be less lucrative in the long run than owning nodes myself.
My offer may make sense for someone with an already running node that wants to migrate to a different provider.
Thanks for your suggestion, I’ve made a few comparisons and my terabyte/dollar ratio was one of the cheapest in the market (e.g. AlphaVPS, Serverica, Nexusbyte and so forth).
Took this list as base for comparison: https://lowendstorage.win/.
Perhaps you mean 48TB?
takes a long time for a new storagenode to start being profitable, if you started recently, it’s been the slowest periods in a long time… so thats just pure bad luck… give it time…
one of the advantages of being in a datacenter would be you should be able to turn up and down your hosting depending on need… so if you got 8TB storage and isn’t using it, you should in most cases be able to simply make it into 2TB or whatever…
ofc that does depend a bit on their setup, but i doubt you are placed on a dedicated server, at best you have a dedicated hdd 
and usually thats not even the case because that would mean they could loose your data… which would be bad for business, and thus it would be redundantly stored… on say a mirror or other such setup…
a home setup might be cheaper, but it will most likely also give a lot more issues to deal with.
and the initial costs maybe much larger.
so all in all just give it time, it should pick up over the next quarter i’m sure.
Cheap hostings typically don’t offer easily/cheaply up- and downgradeable packages. You might have 8TB fixed (or very expensive upgrade options) or even a fixed 8TB HDD without any RAID, depending on the hosting provider. E.g. kimsufi offers rather cheap root servers. Those are real root servers with a real 2TB HDD in it without raid. Had one of those once but didn’t need it anymore. Not enough HDD storage to make it worth the price for STORJ but otherwise a good root server.
I would just add, ethically speaking, it’s still better to stay away of the data centers for participating to the decentralized cloud storage. If the majority were using the main datacenters of the world to run nodes, the global result should be equal to the main centralized competitors when a datacenter shuts down (in a dramatic schema), and we all lose the benefits of a decentralized storage. But if you have no way to participate with your home connection and you already have a server for your own usage as you said, its still an option.
I don’t know how many ipv4 /24 subnets datacenters typically have but because ingress is split within the same ipv4 /24 subnet, there can’t be too many servers running a storj node as that would take them years to even get 1 TB.
So if you got a very cheap provider with lots of HDD space, many people will try to rent a server there. So even if there are 100 nodes in that datacenter on 5 subnets, that would (in the worst case) result in 5 nodes storing a shard for the same file. Ingress however would be quite ridicuolously low as 25 nodes on a subnet means at current rates of ~600GB/month 24GB/mo ingress per node. That on the other hand is not worth any money so at some point the nodes within a datacenter will balance themselves. However, it’s not the amount of nodes that’s important here, it’s the amount of subnets a datacenter offers. 5 subnets won’t be a problem, 20 might very well be in the worst case that all/most subnets get a shard of the same file. Statistically speaking that chance is still really low because the network currently has more than 1000 subnets.
In more expensive datacenters you won’t even find nodes, e.g. german vps providers as they are not cheap and the available HDD storage is way too small to run a node. Some people with root servers might run nodes if they are running the server anyways but nobody would rent a root server for storj.
(btw: I got 2 vps in germany and both have no node in their subnets… however, they both have less than 500GB of storage )
I’m in fact running a dedicated server, not just a HDD.
Indeed, I’m also building a NAS setup to run a local node.
Thanks for your advices!
The dedicated server I have now is from OVH (Kimsufi’s parent company) and got a pretty good deal with them, but still don’t offer ways to downgrade depending on usage.
Based on recent ingress/egress rates my breakeven has gone from under a year to about 5 years. I hope this improves.
That’s awful to hear. Hopefully it’ll get back to the expected levels soon.
This thread is related to the decreased usage last month: https://forum.storj.io/t/poor-download-levels-this-month-nov-2020