Hosting StorJ started off as a hobby of mine.
I was working as a VMware administrator at the time, and I wanted/needed a home enviornment that could mimic not only the servers I had at work, but also the workload induced by guest OSes that was actually doing something
StorJ for me was the perfect candidate - it had network activity, it had disk activity and I was free to choose OS to work on.
I used my platform to learn a lot about VMware automation as well as windows automation.
Gradually, I got all the certifications I wanted from VMware, and as I got my environment more and more right for what I wanted, focus shifted to spend more time on the StorJ aspect.
I run a few hundred nodes today, and have ~100TB hosted from all locations I’m in. Before running Storagenodes, I tried Chia, Filecoin and Burst - but none of them seemed real. It was all lottery tickets, without any real world customers - that’s what I like so much about StorJ, it’s solving a real problem for real customers today.
Does this mean that node growth is slower than on some other platforms? Yes. But I also think it means that StorJ won’t implode like Chia did.