Hello, my problem are the energy prices. I currently pay 0,4031€/kWh in Germany.
At home:
My storagenode runs with a used low power nuc and a used external HDD (12TB). Together they consume 17W on average. So I have fixed costs of about 5€ per month just for electricity.
For the used HDD I paid 162€. When purchased, the hard drive was about 1.5 years old.
I would like to get the money back for the HDD in about 2 years, before the probability of the HDD dying becomes much higher. How Long Do Disk Drives Last?
For my place, my minimum would be:
$1.5/TB storage
$6/TB exgress
$6/TB repair
The storagenode would only pay for the electricity and only the hard drive over 2 years. Only after 2 years I would make a profit until the hdd dies.
At a friend’s place:
I set up the same setup at a friend’s place and pay him $5/month for electricity. The difference here is that he has fiber but no public IPv4. So I currently rent a vpn for the friend’s place for 1,5€ per month. Combined fixed costs are 6,50€/month.
Minimum at my friend’s place:
$1.5/TB storage
$9/TB exgress
$9/TB repair
Anything less than that, I would just turn it off.
I would suggest a few changes:
Storj should increase storage pricing from $4/TB to $5/TB. You don’t have to match Backblaze’s pricing because your speed is faster and the price includes decentralization. These are two big pluses. Also, because of inflation, many other companies are raising their prices. Why not you?
Redesign Held Amount as it is currently broken. As a storagenode, I want the network to be healthy. I would have no problem if the repair cost only $1/TB. Because if a storagenode goes, I might get more data and make money. If the repair costs a lot less, then the Held Amount is a lot less and new Storagenodes would see a lot quicker that they are making some money.
Customers should pay extra for the hosted S3 gateway. (After a trial period).
The free tier should change. Make it 3-6 months so people can test it, but people need to add a phone number/credit card so they don’t just create a new account.
Idea:
How about a marketplace for storage? Each storagenode could set prices that at least cover electricity usage or what makes sense for them. So the price would vary from country to country. Customers could choose which countries they want their data to be in and get a price for it. The market would regulate itself. And Storj could take 5% of what the customers pay.
Not only I agree, but what is even a point in having repair egress be paid? What’s the “why” behind it? Is it only “your hardware is doing work, so why not get paid for it”?
This would make petabyte SNOs winning all the bids, leaving others with nothing. We either go full on (semi-/)professional SNOs and skip the “Lucy runs 2TB node off her NAS that she turns on for 8h on a working day” crap, or we set max SNO size to keep industrial-level ones out of the system (or at least make it a bit harder to make a server-sized setup) so others can compete with prices.
if assuming the approximate best case at 2/3 of the customer payments going to SNO’s
then lowering the expansion factor from 2.7 to 2 would drastically improve the situation for both StorjLabs and SNOs.
i think @BrightSilence is right that optimization is required for this to make any sense for most of us.
been working the numbers and no matter how i look at them, they come up short…
i also accept that 2/3 of the customer money going to SNOs would be a very acceptable deal for SNOs… even if the numbers seems to come up short.
the fact is that if Storj DCS prices remain fixed at their current level.
there is only 1.5$ pr TBm and 7.5$ pr TB egress to go around for StorjLabs and SNOs.
so thats the reality we have to contend with, no amount of complaining can really fix that.
and the numbers just comes up short at the current configuration.
If you don’t pay for it at all, nodes could simply block repair traffic on slow connections. It’s also a little about fairness. If you think egress should be paid, does it matter what kind of egress it is?
Furthermore it provides an incentive for Storj to optimize repair processes.
If repair traffic would be unpaid I would just set the priority so low in my firewall that it will take a long time to finish. I might also ignore some of the repair requests to keep the juicy pieces with high download traffic a bit longer for myself. If too many storage nodes apply that optimization some files will not be repairable.
Unfortunately, there are also storage nodes like mine in the network. I care about my storage node payout. As long as the payout is good enough I will optimize my system for the best customer experience. My goal is to make the customer happy. I will take advantages that don’t impact the customer. For example, I am fine with you serving all the unpaid repair traffic. I am fine with passing my unpaid repair traffic over to your node. That wouldn’t be fair.
With the new rates of $0.8 - $1.2 per TB stored, how many people actually do have unused capacity in the range that would make it worthwhile to invest the effort of running the node or at least see one payment per year? Someone would probably have to have at least 10TB unused that he plans to never use (since nodes are impossible to shrink).
Yeah, I took pretty much the best possible case. Hard drive uses energy, needs cooling, the CPU uses energy (even if the server was on anyway, running the node increases CPU usage etc.
I think that Storj went wrong with overusing the edge services. The initial idea of this was the decentralization. Storage and bandwidth is distributed among the nodes and the nodes presumably pay less for both storage and bandwidth. This way a datacenter-grade service can be made cheaper than paying datacenter costs for storage and bandwidth. This makes sense and it may let Storj compete with the large datacenters on price, while providing similar service.
However, if Storj (or the customers) mainly uses the edge services that do need to pay datacenter rates for bandwidth then this becomes pointless. Now the edge server actually uses more bandwidth than it would use if the data was stored locally (download from node, upload to customer and also the expansion due to erasure coding). So, now it is no longer possible to compete with the large datacenters on price.
What I don’t understand is why are the amounts for SNOs so cheap You couldn’t rent servers with that amount of storage for this price. So why try to pull a fast one on the hand that feeds them where they wouldn’t be where they are today without the SNOs.
You don’t get to decide how much you pay for storage if your renting servers you can try to make deals but over all your not gonna pay dirt prices and get good services. Why not try to cut costs else where and not try to cut costs at the storage level cause that is everything for some it’s not profitable as it is less you started when V3 came out and you were able to buy storage with the surge pay outs that’s the only way or run 100s of nodes to try to squeeze as much as you can to try to make as much as you can.
In my humble opinion if you don’t take care of your SNOs they probably won’t take care of you. The proposal is no good you need to come back with some real numbers cause at these numbers it’s just not worth it to keep going honestly for anyone New or Old.
I think this is now becoming more important to fix. If we really expect people to use spare space, having the ability to shrink nodes becomes a necessity. For what it’s worth though. I did start out with about 10TB of unused space on an existing array when I first started.
That’s kind of the point is it not? If you could, then nodes would just be run on rented servers. We’re expected to use always on hardware and existing free space. Not run highly available server setups with massive bandwidth available.
looking from that perspective,
What if customer will pay mostly for keeping things online, for storage, and very less for egress?
i mean its STORj, right?
hah for storage.
A decenralised one.
A place where your files are SAFE AS F!
like to fully utilize SNOs advantages, which are basicly costless traffic, and combined with STORj super redundancy, basicly also for free, lets make those things bulging.
If You would pay me like $2,5/TB or even 3$ for storage, to be honest? i couldn’t care less about egress or repair.
i mean up to some degree. It could be $0,5/TB or even $0,2/TB for egress if storage $3/TB
But if someone want to host on us some video contents, some ceiling need to be considered.
Like my node at 15-30Mbps upload connection can send max like 5-10TB a month.
if sending all the time 24/7/mo.
So can’t decide if i want just sit chilling and get $3/TB for storage and 0 for egress, and make customers to salivate how cheap we are, or to capitalize if some mofos want to make another youtube, or rumble, or bitchute, and make me sending 10TB a mo, but so far? Thats what we were looking for all those years, and egress is lacking from the beginning, soo mayby lets make it basicaly free and let them pay for storage a fair price, so we can buy new HDD every so time, and expand nodes. And let them cry from joy how cheap bandwitdh is.
They keep repeating that saying but it’s just not how it is you can’t just use hardware already running with unused space it’s just not how anything works. Like you couldn’t run a storagenode along side your windows machine on unused space no one has more then 4tb rusts. So there for it would be no way to run a storagenode at the same time as where you would store games you could never play anything on the amount of IO used.
Likewise. Everyone happy with a PV on the roof and a battery, securing constant low operational energy cost.
Replacing hardware not included, taking into consideration that hardware will NOT be replaced, if defect („reuse old hardware phenomenon“ - who has old NAS devices on stock privately?).
Storj is going to drop payments for SNO, what about prices for end-users?
if we are talking about commercial model- it should be connected in some way.
if not- we can just write clearly: STORJ need more money and instead of earning more with friendly interface and features decided to cut some expenses (pay less for SNO). is it correct?
Just to put my little piece in. I live in the UK and have seen electricity prices double in the last year. I for one would have to seriously consider whether to shut my nodes down have a drop in payout price. But what I will say is (and i don’t mind being educated by someone more knowledgeable) why the node pay structure is the way it is in the first place. What I mean by this is, why have the ingress and egress payments at all why not just simplify the payout by total amount stored? If Storj want to charge their customers this fee then so be it but just pay nodes by TB stored. cant speak for anyone else but if this was around $3 per TB I’d come out with around same monthly outcome with out all the complicated traffic costs. Please explain if I’m wrong but why over think it. it traffic doesn’t effect the cost of my connection so why worry about it.
The lesson from Uber (and Lyft) is that they remain unprofitable without massive venture capital subsidies or jacking consumer cost while minimizing pay to drivers.
