As soon as plotting for pools is available I want to setup a cloud farm. My local farming is very limited due to a low WAF (wife acceptance factor). The farming setup is pretty easy for me, because I have a technical background. What gives me headaches is finding a suitable cloud provider for plotting. I wanted to use Hetzner (cheap and free egress) and I had acutally ordered several servers the day before they banned chia plotting, luckily I could cancel the order.
So my question to all that created plots in the cloud. What hoster did you use?
AWS, GCP, Azure are all way to expensive. Ideal case would be to spin up several instance for a couple of days without a long commitment.
No I don’t want to buy plots, because I mainly do it for the technical challenge.
It seems I didn’t describe well what I want to do. I don’t want to download or snowball the plots to me in case of AWS. I want to use S3 compatible storage provider (most likely Crowdstorage) with a small VPS for farming.
The problem is filling the storage with plots. I wanted to use Hetzner for plotting and than transferring the plots to storage. But this isn’t prossible any more. So I’m looking for an alternative for plotting.
In case with the Hetzner server I could have plotted around 600 plots per month for around 100€ per server. I know thats very cheap but I’m aiming to stay below 1€ per plot.
U will still have to transport the plots to the cloud storage, if u only get an unmetered 100mbit connection it will take about 3h per plot to transfer(limits u to max 8 plots a day)
If u have to pay for traffic u likely spent 3-8€/plot for traffic alone
And ofc hetzner would been cheap since u run down their ssd in 20 days and don’t care about replacement parts, no sensible hoster would allow u to do that, ur best bet is getting a disk based hoster where u can rent a server with 16+ hdds and plot 1 plot concurrently per drive, then send the plots afterwards to your cloud storage
But those are rare outside b2b sadl
U could get a server from eBay with lots of disk bays and search a collocation place, it may be the cheapest in the long run (even cheaper than 1€/plot since disks don’t wear out)
Yes renting a server with a dozen small SAS discs would be perfect. But I wasn’t able to find any that doesn’t also have like 2x Xeon processors and costs a fortune.
The dual E5-2680/E5-2690 builds with two processors and 64gb of DDR3 are great for Chia. $500 gets you everything except SSDs. Just add SSDs and you have for around $1k USD a build that does 30-40 plots per day. Very available on eBay or otherwise.
I believe the problem in that scenario is the time to do the lookups within the plot files. If you’re not answering challenges within ~25 seconds, you’ll be too late to get rewards (and the log files recommend < 5s).
Yes you can use both for storeing the plots. I have seen people use Digital Ocean to run the harvester as both don’t have any compute. The problem with GCP, AWS and Azure is that you can’t get the plots out because it’s 9$ per plot for the outgoing traffic.
So for plotting you need a hoster that has unmetered outgoing traffic and is big enough to don’t care about someone plotting. And also must have servers which are fitting for plotting.
Seems to be working for a few people I know (at around the size of 300plots), don’t have scan/harvest time numbers of them yet tho, I may try it soon too once I getthe wasabi staff to reduce retention to 1 month:) (they offer that when asked via support)
And testing backblaze b2 via bandwirh alliance(Cloudflare) currently
Most are at Contabo as colocation, currently also looking to set a few up at a friend in Switzerland
, a few machines are at my Home, and few others come from the community
