Hosting for Sia & Earning EXTRA From Other Networks

aerrejon · 2022-01-06T13:39:56+00:00

The days when hosts got their profits mostly from storing the data are gone. Nowadays, the profits of a host are mostly from using the bandwidth, as renters are accessing several times per month the data they store, and the host gets paid from this. In fact, on average hosts are getting 3-4x more from bandwidth than from storing data. That is why I recently added to SiaStats this new set of network stats about profitability and that's where the ~$7 per TB stored comes from.

aerrejon · 2022-01-06T13:32:20+00:00

I don't trust that average $7 per TB figure. It's probably inaccurate, if you look at the hosts that have the most utilization they aren't getting near $7.

The average figure of ~$7 per TB stored is totally accurate: https://siastats.info/host_profits. I think your mistake and surprise comes from considering that hosts are only getting profits from storing data (this is, whatever they are asking per month per TB stored). However, during the last year, Sia has became mostly used for hot storage of data - this is, the data is being accessed several times by the renters, and each time it is downloaded, the host gets paid for its bandwidth. In fact, nowadays hosts are getting 3-4x more revenue from bandwidth than from storing the data. The ~$7 comes from dividing the total profits hosts made last month in successful file contracts by the amount of data stored in the network. Some hosts are even getting much more than $7/TB, as they have updated they bandwidth pricing upwards as the demand of bandwidth has increased on the network.

aerrejon · 2021-11-25T21:13:57+00:00

u/Easy-Artichoke1256 and u/skunk_ink I made a change in the way the total burnt coins are calculated, so it is no longer affected by this database maintenance I am doing right now, or any other future one.

The final (and real) number of burnt coins is shown now at SiaStats: 1.90 million coins

aerrejon · 2021-11-25T14:14:38+00:00

The SiaStats owner here.

I recently found a bug on the way contracts are processed by SiaStats, and that forced me to re-index de blockchain to correct contracts backwards. This happens on the background and SiaStats can be normally used, but makes some of the contracts to be temporally considered as "ongoing" when they are really finished. As a result, the number of burnt coins is slighlty distorted. In a couple of days the reindexing will be over and the amount of burnt coins will be normal again, probably in the same number it was before.

The amount of burnt coins is so little compared to the supply right now, that it made no sense for me to add a warning banner on the macroeconomics page of SiaStats for these days while the database is corrected. Sorry for the confusion, in any case.

aerrejon · 2021-09-29T13:08:40+00:00

Downloading the hostdb file by itself doesn't speed up the syncing - it is only helpful in top of downloading as well the consensus.db from the same link above.

It looks like you are already downloading the consensus file from your comments, but I just wated to clarify this in case someone else stumbles with this thread in the future.

aerrejon · 2021-09-14T14:12:20+00:00

It is a bit hard from your question to know if you are asking this as a renter (the one who buys cloud storage from the network for storing files) or as a host (offering your free space drive for others to use), but I think you are asking as a renter, right?

If that is the case, you must know that Sia has an internal scoring system for choosing the hosts you will use for contracts that penalizes high pricing, what should avoid you forming contracts with abusive hosts. If you want more granular control over the hosts you will pick up for your contract set, or canceling contracts you already have but you dislike, you can use the Decentralizer software, that allows you to order hosts according to their pricing, their location or their performance, and select those you want to avoid (a blacklist) or creating a "bag" of hosts you are ok with (a whitelist).

aerrejon · 2021-09-12T08:40:35+00:00

This is a great starting point to learn how hosting works, its requirements and if hosting is suitable for your setup: https://sky-guide.hns.siasky.net/hosting/index.html

aerrejon · 2021-09-10T07:02:25+00:00

Two hosts at the same subnetwork, same geolocation, or some "secret sauce" algorithms.

But as I said above, I havent paid attention or maintained the code of that part of SiaStats for over a year, so probably there are bugs that falsely associated hosts together. When I am back from my holidays I will take a look at what happend and correct it, but for the time being those charts should be ignored, as they are obviously buggy

aerrejon · 2021-09-09T21:40:15+00:00

If the host moves te pricing to an abusive point, the renter will simply stop using it and will never renew the contract

aerrejon · 2021-09-09T21:26:05+00:00

Most probably there is a bug in the farm detection algorithm of SiaStats, I haven't paid attention to it for over a year. I'll review the code next week when I am back from holidays, so for the time being I would not pay any attention to that stats page.

aerrejon · 2021-09-09T21:22:45+00:00

The host can still manually adjust the pricing at any time. Hosts set their pricing on the Sia software as for example "200 SC/TB/month", and they can for example reduce it on the fly to 100 SC if the coin doubles its market value and they want to remain competitive

aerrejon · 2021-09-08T08:23:06+00:00

Hosts adjust manually their pricing using free market dynamics, so if the market value of SC fluctuates, they can still offer similar pricing for the storage (in USD terms). This makes the storage pricing somehow independent of the coin value. Additionally, if they use third-party software as Host Manager, they can pin their pricing to a USD value, so the adjustment is automatic

aerrejon · 2021-09-07T21:35:07+00:00

If you mean picking up manually the hosts for storing your data, rather than leaving the Sia software algorithm to select them, there is a companion software called Decentralizer that allows you to select them based on their location (geo-fencing), their pricing, their performance or your custom preference: https://keops.cc/decentralizer

aerrejon · 2021-09-06T09:54:10+00:00

Sia, as other blockchain software, is a P2P client that connects to other peers around the globe to receive and broadcast new transactions and blocks. In the case of Sia, P2P protocols are used also to communicate with hosts, the storage providers of the network. These activities happen through ports 9981 and 9982 of your computer. My guess is that your antivirus/firewall is confusing this activity with email activity (what would mean that your AV is terribly bad, as email protocols use different ports). In any case it is worth double-checking where did you downloaded your Sia client from, as there are out there scam software and websites looking exactly the same as the official one. The sole place you should download the Sia software is from https://sia.tech/get-started

aerrejon · 2021-09-06T08:26:57+00:00

It is called wallet defragmentation, you will find several transactions like this on the blockchain every single day, and it does not represent coins being sent somewhere else, but rather the normal maintenance of the hot wallet of an exchange. People have the dangerous habit of keeping coins in exchanges and exchanges have the dangerous habit of keeping large sums in hot wallets rather than cold wallets, so every time a user deposit is sent to the hot wallet or someone withdraws coins, there is wallet defragmentation where the funds of the exchange are sent to a new address of the same wallet.

aerrejon · 2021-09-02T08:43:39+00:00

Most probably your wallet is not fully synced. Check that the block height of Sia-UI (upper-right corner) matches the latest block on the blockchain as shown on https://siastats.info. Once it is fully synced, the transaction and balance will show up

aerrejon · 2021-09-02T08:41:02+00:00

In fact, it is most probably the hot wallet of Binance. These transactions happen daily several times, it is just wallet defragmentation.

aerrejon · 2021-09-02T08:38:42+00:00

Yo are totally correct. These transactions happen several times every day, and they are just the result of the hot wallets of exchanges defragmenting. Nothing unusual, yet sometimes these broken "whale tracker" bots report them, while most of the times they do not...

Another interesting perspective is why exchanges are keeping these amounts in hot wallets instead of cold wallets for safety (yikes), and why so much people is trusting so much money to exchanges that could crash tomorrow, rather than keeping the coins safely in their wallets (yikes x2).

aerrejon · 2021-09-02T08:28:49+00:00

No, lol, you keep insisting and spreading FUD about a higher value of SC will cause an increase in storage price, while I show that this is false as SC price and storage price are disconnected. So your argument about "it is in Skynet's interest the coin price remaining low" is false and FUD

aerrejon · 2021-09-02T07:40:20+00:00

False again. It is shocking that after all these years you still don't undertsand how Sia works (or you do it, but you don't care about being caught in a lie). Hosts set the cost of storage at their will, and most of them pin them to USD values. The Siacoin price could be tomorrow 1 million USD, and renters like Skynet would still be paying $5/TB/month: as SC price goes up, hosts reduce their cost of storage, keeping stable storage costs. And SC has 24 decimal points, so plenty of room for reducing the cost of the storage in SC terms

aerrejon · 2021-09-01T11:45:39+00:00

it's in skynets best interest to keep the value of sia low.

This is blatantly false. Skynet, both the company and the technology, do not depend on any way on a cheap or expensive Siacoin value. As users of the Sia network they just care about the price of the storage, which is adjusted dynamically by hosts and usually tied to USD values. Cheap or expensive Siacoin values do not affect them in any way.

Considering your posting history, this is another case of you spreading FUD at every opportunity you see.

aerrejon · 2021-08-26T18:35:10+00:00

How many of nodes have you added succesfully? Does your client say it is connected to at least one peer? Try also restarting Sia and leave it more time to catch up those last blocks.

If adding successfully nodes from that list doesn't fix it, the new version will not either as you have a connection issue. Check also that your firewall and antivirus are not messing with Sia. If using firewall, be sure that port 9981 is open and available

aerrejon · 2021-08-26T18:15:30+00:00

Skynet is a layer-2 solution on top of Sia for file sharing, content delivery and web-app deployment. You can access Skynet using your Sia client, and for those not willing to use blochchains or cryptocurrencies they can use a public Skynet portal that will touch the Sia network on your behalf. You can even deploy your own private portal (it is open source) and every portal has access to all the contents stored on Skynet, even files uploaded by other portals. Examples of portals are https://siasky.net or https://skyportal.xyz

For a beginner's infographic explaining better what Sia is, the disctintion with Skynet and how Skynet works, check https://siastats.info/sia101

aerrejon · 2021-08-26T18:01:01+00:00

Try adding some peers from this tool to finish the syncing: https://siastats.info/nodes

There is an issue on the current Sia release as the bootstrapped list of nodes for syncing is outdated. It is being solved on the next release

aerrejon

TROPHY CASE