Perhaps one of the interesting but less talked about benefits of plotting and farming in the cloud is the ability to instantly throttle your consumption in any direction according to market conditions (buy more when difficulty is low and release it when necessary). Storage is useless without compute so it will be easy to generate more plots when needed. In the cloud, compute is everywhere. Imagine being able to click a button and have 200TB (plot by plot) presented to your farmer effortlessly in near real-time over the course of a week. That is PLaaS ( absolutely nothing to lay your hands on, just a keyboard). What are your thoughts on the subject?
So I’m intrigued overall.
Can you share more details about how you have this setup? Let’s say I want to buy 50TB of plots from you. Are you running VMs in the cloud to do the plotting, then storing in an object store like S3 or something? Do I then farm from the cloud? Or can I download them to my local machines and farm there?
What are your various storage options?
I think the biggest problem will be the changing cost to maintain buying cloud storage and vulnerability when it comes to attacks. I remember when Guarda wallet was compromised through GoDaddy cloud and people where uploading and opening their credentials to hackers. I think Chia AMA recently didn’t recommend cloud usage and explained all about hardware storage only.
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I have unused storage on my iCloud account. Can’t I farm that as well?
I’ve heard on Reddit that all the big players do not farm in the cloud, which implies it is not cost effective.
This does not surprise me. Bulk storage is cheap, like Backblaze, right? However, you can’t use bulk storage because the farming process needs to actively scan the plots for wins. You need live disk storage, which is a very different thing… let’s look at… say… Digital Ocean. Here’s pricing for Storage Optimized droplets:
Or, even better, here’s me using the Digital Ocean pricing calculator to build a 10TB droplet with 1 cpu, 1gb RAM, and 1TB of allowed transfer per month:
So yeah, if you’re down to pay $1000 per month for 10tb storage… go for it… I guess? 
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I’ve used DO and Linode for years, and it took until you posted that to realize how absolutely insane those storage prices are. I get that you’re getting industrial strength hosting with them, but…wow.
Makes me think even more about things like SIA coin and other decentralized storage projects and how they might legitimately start eroding some of these expensive products if they can get enough traction.
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If all you want is a cheap Linux box with tons of storage, you can get that much cheaper - often well under $10/TB/month - from oldschool VPS providers. LowEndStorage.win | Storage on the Cheap has a list, you can find more if you look around.
And we don’t even need that. Some managed seedbox providers offer shell/SFTP access. I’m currently renting one with an 8TB quota and more than enough traffic allowance for a little over $20/month and using it to farm, mounted on my personal server in another country via sshfs. While chia plots check is worryingly slow (takes several minutes per plot) and I haven’t won any blocks yet, the speeds that show up in my logs are perfectly fine.
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Yeah, interesting… I have a topic for racking and colocation and feel free to jump in there! I’m about to put in a 45-drive JBOD I bought for $550 once I figure out the details…
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Sia will change the game forever and we need decentralized alternatives. I’m still browsing all the time for good price per TB hard drives. With Chia I go back years when all of us started it. I love it.
Hi All! I must say it has been a busy week (great for all of us)! Let me start here… We are processing orders like crazy due to the netspace growth but keeping up (all facilities are heavily utilized). The good thing is that our Storage provider (Wasabi) is keeping up. We are literally pushing a 1PB delivery to them at a constant 110TB per day (will wrap that delivery up in 9 days, our new plot record).
Tech:. We only send to an S3 compliant target 
and Wasabi has the absolute best deal in town. We have an established relationship with them and can get volume discounts based on commitment amount. Any other target will include a bandwidth charge ($0.06/GB). This is $0 with Wasabi (for you as well if you want to download the plots). The easiest thing to do is just stand up an $80 /per month VM and farm directly in the cloud and mount your S3 plots natively (your VM will be on the ring vs behind your local broadband router). All of my cloud farmers have outperformed local instances hands down in XCH wins.
We have customized VMs that are highly tuned for S3 network transport and orchestration to streamline setup and plotting. We move VMs (plot processes) across NVMes in real-time based on I/O throughput to get the maximum efficiency based on network/disk load. I’m confident we are the only shop with this level of orchestration/automation in place (currently). This is how we’re able to deliver at speed.
In summary, it works (very well). With the projections being thrown out there in regards to coin price, this will turn out to be extremely cost effective. I will be facilitating a 4PB delivery in coming days. This will be a new cloud chia plotting record.
Visit https://chiaappliance.com if interested in our services. We are here for you!
V/r,
Peyton Lassiter
Founder (Chia Appliance) #PLaaS
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Interesting insights to how you’re doing stuff!
(I moved this to the B/S/T section as this is a paid service)
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I’ve thought about using Wasabi, but I was worried the S3 protocol would cause problems.
I assume you’re using S3FS? And that’s efficient enough to farm from?
Can someone explain this comment by chia appliance above? “All of my cloud farmers have outperformed local instances hands down in XCH wins.”
What are they or what can anyone else do to increase our ability to win XCH?
Thx
I’ll clarify: All of my personal cloud farmers have outperformed my local farmers (behind my broadband router), even when both had the same amount of plots. Maybe it’s just luck but I know the cloud works much better for me. I was skeptical when I read that the cloud is too slow for this software. It depends on the underlying cloud architecture.
Good to know. Always curious if there are ways to up the chance of rewards. I doubt is internet speed as I have good up and down speeds. It just must be chance? I would love to hear other opinions.
What do you mean by “profitable”?
We don’t even know the price of a chia yet.
That comes out to $8.19 per TB per month.
You can get high capacity for two to three times that per TB one time.
Do you need to rent a server in a datacenter for some reason?
@zogstrip I think the price will be over $1k.
@freeze I want to avoid the purchase and management of the material at home!
Like I recommended earlier in the thread, you can still get better deals per TB from other hosts - look for seedboxes (either share accounts you can mount via sshfs from a much cheaper server, or dedicated servers / VPS advertised for this purpose) or high-storage VPSes (often advertised for backup). Maybe you can find a better deal for “normal” dedicated server offerings too if you shop around a little.
While (non-dedicated) seedboxes do have other tenants, they also tend to be on better-than-gigabit lines, so you can usually still saturate a 1gbps uplink when filling them. (Speaking of which - can you even upload your plots fast enough? Even 1gbps is really slow compared to a 10gbps network, let alone just moving the filled-up disks.) They’re also usually on redundant storage that’s included in the price and you don’t have to worry about.
That said, if OVH appeals to you and you expect to make enough off this that you don’t mind paying a little extra, sure, go for it.
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