Please explain how you did it?
I just assume, that the test data must be replaced with a customers’ data.
P.S. I’m SNO as well
That would be perfectly fine with me.
My assumptions:
- Increase the customer storage price to $5 or $6.
- I will be able to buy a used hard drive just for a storagenode.
- I will be able to cover the power consumption.
- I can break even in about 2 years.
- With this we can reach Exabyte.
Calculations:
I pay 0.4031€/kWh in Germany.
I have a nuc and a 12TB hdd with an average consumption of about 17W.
So about 5€ per month for electricity.
A used 12TB hdd costs about 162€ and is about 1,5-2 years old.
With a new node in 2 years and:
2$ storage
2€ storage
2€ repair
I may earn $368 in the first 2 years.
-120€ for electricity - 162€ hdd I would be left with 86€.
That would be an average earning of about 3.5€/month. That would be worth it to buy another used hdd when the first one is full.
My absolute minimum would be:
$1.7 storage
2€ storage
2€ repair
I may earn 319$ in the first 2 years
-120€ for electricity - 162€ for hard drives I would be left with 37€.
That would be an average earning of about 1.5€/month. That would be ok, because it gives me a little wiggle room in case energy prices go up even more.
In both cases it is not really worth it in the first two years, but at least the break even point is reached. The hdd is now about 4 years old in both cases. After 4 years, the probability increases strongly that the hdd can break at any moment. So every additional month would be a hope that the hard disk will not break. And for every month I would earn something.
I used for a new node and calculated with realistic-earnings-estimator
Forgive me, I always assumed you were affiliated with Storj since you often sound as if you are. And by you mentioning “when” it came accross as there not being any customer data yet. My bad.
Oh I completely understand for the sake of ease, but there should be incentive to use something that doesn’t cost Storj as much… like I’ve suggested about giving customers large free bandwidth packages by capitalizing on the fact that bandwidth typically doesn’t cost SNO’s anything. Pay us decent per TB and use more of our bandwidth as a marketing tactic!
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oh, sorry about confusion, I’m affiliated with Storj, but I have my own opinions 
and I’m a Community leader in a first place, so I want to send all thoughts from the Community to the team to take more focus on what’s Community need.
and we will make sure that’s listening by the company
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“A download can become a chargeable event for 2 times the actual file size if the gateway is running on another cloud provider.”
As this would probably be the use case for most customers, this is obviously a HUGE turnoff. Another reason I suggest generous free bandwidth packages. But SNO’s really need to get at least $2.50 to $3/TB stored for this in my opinion. It would give Storj something substantial over the competition in order to incentivize high bandwidth customers.
This is actually not a problem, if you conclude a partnership with Storj. We have a ways to reduce these costs to 0, but need to know the exact use-case.
The simplest way is to use a VM (or VPS) provider who do not charge for egress, or use known compute cloud providers like AWS or use a fog-computing.
Some posts ago I suggested to have a mechanism that would offload old data (the most cold one) from old to new nodes, making room for new data that has more potential to generate egress. So it’s a bonus for old nodes, making sure at least some data is fresh, but a small hindrance to new nodes, since they would get a mix of fresh and old data. Though, more or less, each node would eventually be a similar mix of old and new. Yes, that generates additional traffic, but I’d gladly send a GB of old data to new node for free so I can replace it with a GB of still hot data.
it’s hard to distinguish the “cold storage” from a “hot storage” now…
however, it’s offtopic.
Would be much more useful to know, what’s price is compelling to your setup? or at least how costly it for you to run a node.
They may not charge for egress, but if they charge for ingress it’s all the same. Running a gateway on a VPS means your data counts as both ingress as well as egress as it’s coming from the customers systems IN through the VPS gateway and back OUT to storage nodes. When accessing data, it’s coming IN from the storage nodes and back OUT to the customer. If the VPS provider charges for both, as well as Storj bandwidth costs, they’re actually getting hit 3 times.
Using data from storjnet.info, energypriceindex.com for EU countries (feb. 2023) and globalpetrolprices.com for others (they seem from 2022), for the first 54 top countries by node numbers, I calculated the following energy consumptions and costs for storagenodes at the end of february 2023:
- for 10Wh per node (1 HDD), 7.3KW/month/node;
- for 20490 out of 20699 nodes (98.99%);
- total energy cost per all nodes 38225$;
- average energy cost per node 1.87$;
- 7317 nodes with cost under 1$;
- 3744 nodes with cost between 1.01 - 2$;
- 4528 nodes with cost between 2.01 - 3$;
- 4901 nodes with cost between 3.01 - 4$;
- highest cost per node 3.86$;
- lowest cost per node 0.23$;
The prices used are for households, not businesses, and are the average for the respective countries. I don’t know how accurate they are. For ex. I pay double the price found on the internet. So for a safe aproximation, you can double the values.
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Is it appealing though? If yes, then we can figure out how to do it.
I’ve already shared. Now I’m waiting for Storj Labs move during twitter space event.
I have more examples, how to make it more expensive
You may run your main load in one provider (Azure for example), and run gateway-st on another one (AWS or GCP).
You will pay for egress to Azure when you upload to the network, pay to AWS (because it’s now egress for them) and pay for downloads: to Storj for egress, to AWS for egress (to Azure).
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UFO arrived and left it here: for fun and profit
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I think now it’s the time for RAID owners to rethink the setups. I can’t see worth running more than 1 HDD per node.
Also, who wants to stay, should consider moving the data from small to bigger HDD, like 20TB. There will be no gains from under 6TB drives.
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Lol. All the more reason to offer free bandwidth. But it should be done on a per customer basis depending on customer requirements. This way as Storj grows and the technology matures these free packages can potentially be scaled back. Customers would be more than willing to pay more than $4/TB as it would still be far less than competitors as long as they can save on the bandwidth side of things. But even at $4, they’re not goinng to switch if bandwidth costs will increase.
For honestly, I think it’s better to convert a free tier to a REAL trial tier. Like - “you have 150GB storage and 150GB/mo bandwidth for 3 months, then you need either become a paid customer, or go away”.
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Stop with this free engress. If it wasn’t for the engress earnings, I wouldn’t even started storagenodes. The engress is the main money maker for SNOs. Who dosen’t aprove that, he dosen’t run nodes. And don’t tell me you have some 16-18 TB nodes that are already filled up and you are happy with them, and don’t look to expand.
Good point @Alexey. Free accounts must be temporary.
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I actually just made the switch off raid pools partially for that reason. Otherwise I would have had to spend more $ optimizing the pools.
That’s a good idea for the free tier, but it doesn’t do anything to attract the bigger players. They couldn’t care less about the free tier. The free tier is good for devs or people that want to simply test out the network without having to pay for that testing, or even everyday people just looking for a cheaper backup option. It does nothing to offer incentives to attract big customers.