I am considering opening Storj nodes in four locations with less than 100 nodes each.
Currently it would be Hong Kong, Israel, Norway, and Bulgaria.
I’m committed to running each node for at least one year, and I’m excited to learn as much as I can about the process. Profit is not my primary motivation, but it would be nice to make some money along the way.
I’ve seen some people say that location doesn’t matter for nodes, but I’m not convinced. It seems like nodes in Europe and the US would have an advantage because they are located in areas where hardware and bandwidth are more affordable.
I am still undecided about whether or not to start these nodes.
I would appreciate any feedback you have!
My main questions are…
1. Does it matter which locations I place my nodes?
2. Will it also get the same distribution of ingress and egress once they are vetted?
3. Wouldn’t nodes that are located closer to customers receive more ingress and egress data?
Here are the some details of each node:
Hong Kong, Hong Kong:
1 vCPU - 1GB RAM - 2TB Disk Tel Aviv, Israel:
2vCPU - 4GB RAM - 2TB Disk Oslo, Norway:
2vCPU - 4GB RAM - 2TB Disk Sofia, Bulgaria:
4vCPU - 2GB RAM - 2TB Disk
If your node is closer to a customer, it may have lower latency than other nodes, and then it would win the race more often and receive more data, in theory. I set up a node behind a VPN running out of Singapore with the highest latency available. It was an experiment to see how it would differ from a similar node setup in North America, not behind a VPN. The node in Singapore retrieved slightly less data than the node in North America, but it was not by a substantial amount. I believe this is partially due to the volume of data being added to the network at any one time, allowing most healthy nodes to gain data simultaneously. In other words, there was enough to go around. But that would depend on how busy the network is overall. The last few months it was pretty busy.
This would be an interesting experiment, if you start them all in the same time and report back your stored data and egress each month, and if… you use somenthing like 8-10TB drives. With 2 TB drives they will fill up pretty quickly, and the egress will start to get lower and lower.
Best case scenario: you will fill all nodes in 2 months, and make around 150$ in the first year.
I think your question 1 and 3 have been addressed. This one not yet entirely. It is possible to have buckets locked to a geographic area. This will mostly be done due to data privacy regulations. It is discouraged by Storj Labs because it limits the scale advantages of Storj and actually has no privacy benefits as it doesn’t matter where data that is encrypted and split up is stored. As far as I can tell so far, the impact of that has been minimal though.
