Hi All! @dchuk pulled me away from the keyboard to provide some insight on the approach to cloud farming. Once you are provided with plots from a PLaaS provider, the next step is determine exactly how you’re going to farm. In fact, this should be step 1 because this is where the chia cloud magic happens. In essence, you find a cloud host configuration that can provide you with the network bandwidth and low latency to your S3 backend. Ideally you want this to be a non-metered 10gb connection. You will choke on a single 1gb link. Without the required filter performance, farming in the cloud will be in vain. There are many good hosting providers out there. Just be sure you are as close to your S3 buckets from a host perspective as positive. Plotting as we all know is a totally different art but plotting in the cloud provides the most flexibility and scale one can achieve (quickly especially now that drives are getting scarce).
Thanks for hopping in! Do you have recommended hosting providers?
Always my pleasure! Unfortunately I don’t have a preferred list of hosting providers. I had to acquire my own space and configs since I knew my reqs for my plotting operation was going to be custom. However, farming is just straight forward so you can literally pick anyone that can give you dedicated cycles and bandwidth. I actually have quite a few customers that are farming at home but they are in the same city as their Wasabi region or very close with low latency highspeed connectivity.
Do you have any stats on this?
I’m now farming 216 plots (21.39 TiB) over SFTP to three storage servers with 35ms RTT and I only get a peak of 1-2Mbit/s for a second whenever 1-3 plots pass the filter.
2/3 of my times are below 1s, almost 3/4 are below 5s, the worst I’ve had is 11s and the first (and so far only) time I’ve found a block it took 9s.
1gb is fine for a small number of plots but if you’re going well above that (hundreds of TB and beyond) and moving data around like I am, you’re going to need more. However , got a good report from a happy customer leveraging Digital Ocean for farming (they have roughly 500TB online now in Wasabi (east-1) and I’m pumping them an additional 300TB as I type…
“I ended up using the digitalocean droplets, works like a charm! Just had an issue the first 2 days where it did not farm anything for me. Turns out I installed a dev0 version (following the official instructions, but okay), which yielded no farming results so that sucked. But I fixed all of that and getting about 8-10 XCH per day now.
A friend of mine is building plotting/farming rigs, but it will take him a long time to fill them up. I told him he’s better off buying some plots from you…”
Damn, thanks for posting this 
My home farmer was also on 1.1.2.dev0. That didn’t seem to be a problem going by the logs, but I just replaced it with the .deb. Better safe than sorry.
Fair enough, but we were talking about the uplink on a farmer, not moving data around. Clearly you want much more bandwidth (and sustainable, not just burst) for that.
that’s right. with 500TB you will farm 4 XCH per day. As netspace increases that may come down to an avg of 80 XCH per month. Price of XCH is around 1k in future market. So that is a good deal in spending $2995 and getting $80k back…
And BOOM 
, just like that I just landed 2 more XCH in the cloud from my Wasabi buckets 5 minutes ago. I’m going to keep farming up here until the cows 
literally come home!!! 
10min flat. Just one of my appliances will drop ship 8TB per day.
I think we have to be careful with the future markets and their projected price of 1K/ XCH. For now is just a speculation especially in Asia in some suspicious pre sells. Until we have transactions on 03/05 and future adoption with market appreciation there is no way to know the price. For everyone is probably important to see that price even reaching as soon as possible. Anyway I believe we’ll have a huge success in this bull cycle. Good luck everyone 
So what is the consensus on XCH price now? I don’t even know where to look. What’s the best “official” source on price?
Because you’re right, the price will need to be VERY high to justify farming in the cloud… plotting is relatively cheap, but farming, not so much.
It’s all over the place. On some it’s like $6500 (BiBox) and on others in the $600-700 range (WhaleEx).
See the exchanges that have it listed as of now.
Coinbase has it at $887 but they don’t trade just see from other places.
I generally like to look at Coinmarketcap as they do aggregate views of trading prices. I can’t tell which exchanges they tap into though, but for Chia it’s looking like $760 at the moment which seems like a reasonable price between those listed in the previous reply.
Ah, to add on to that, there is a list of exchanges Coinmarketcap seems to look at, combining price and volume to come up with the price in their listing:
CoinMarketCap algorithmically compares the Reported Volume of exchanges against our data model. The Confidence Indicator indicates the level of confidence we have that the Reported Volume is accurate.
Confidence Indicator reports a number from 0% to 100%, and are categorized into bands:
76-100% High
51-75% Moderate
0-50% Low
I have been trying to plot no AWS with very mixed results!
Machines with lower number of vCPUs peform relatively better. However once you go for 36 and beyond, the performance drops like a rock. I believe the problem is the disk throughput! io2 is extremely expensive to plot and really adds to the bill. I am experimenting with raid0 gp3 volumes to see if it would increase plots per day but still not much luck! 
@chiaappliance are you generating plots locally and storing them on wasabi or generating on the cloud as well?
I am a bit curious on the setup! 
That is exactly what we do! We get them beamed to the cloud immediately after generation (so fast we need very little storage on the appliances themselves). Very efficient.
Hey all – just wanted to let everyone know there is hope. I started solo plotting on my own around 3 weeks ago with 2x 2TB NVMEs and a 32 core threadripper. At one point I decided to try adding more plots to keep up with network growth and used @chiaappliance as a test run. Everything went well and I mapped a drive to wasabi (where the plots were added). Either way, I have around 24TB total at the moment and ended up with 2 XCH a few days ago. Can’t wait to switch over to pooling once it’s launched, but just wanted to let the forum know that this is a very viable option for solo farming and pools in the near future.
