Professional Web Hosts vs Consumer Devices
Weighing Up Costs and Environmental Footprint
Following Frank Sylverster’s overview of the environmental aspect — crucial but normally overlooked in storage systems — we’d like to reinforce our promise to deliver a more energy efficient system with some brute facts.
It goes without saying that renting disc space from the inveterate hosts instead of amateurs reduces the risks that are inevitably associated with the consumer devices.
If we take power efficiency which is calculated as storage volume to electricity consumption ratio, the equipment used by hosting professionals proves far more efficient than consumer devices (see the table below).
To weigh up the carbon footprints, we took an average HDD with capacity equaling to 1 TB. A brand new personal computer might have up to 4 such HDDs, although it’s not the case for the vast majority of PCs. Generally, they have only one HDD (maximum two) HDDs. However, we give consumer devices a head start in this example taking the number of HDDs equaling to four. At the same time, a hosting server normally contains up to 30 HDDs, but let’s take a modest one with 12 HDDs.
The power of PC is around 300 Wh; for hosting server it makes nearly 500 Wh. I want to make a caveat that these are the ballpark figures I’ve got from our technical team, so they reflect the big picture, but if you want to find exceptions, you definitely will.
As we are looking at decentralized storage systems, we also take into account that the PC of a system participant must work all day long (yes, that’s what is meant by an uninterrupted service!). So the monthly use of energy will total to 300 Wh * 24h * 30d = 216 kW (for all the 4 HDDs. That is 54 kW per HDD).
For hosting server monthly energy consumption makes 500 Wh * 24h * 30d = 360 kW. And that is for 12 HDDs, or 30 kW per HDD. Given that 1 kW costs about $0.12 in the USA (that’s also an average, see the caveat above), we get the total costs of energy per month, which are then divided into 4 and 12 correspondingly.
Overall, the energy consumption per HDD and consequently the cost of storing 1 terabyte speak in favor of the professional hosting equipment. As we’ve arrived at this conclusion, This cost effectiveness means much more than , but also takes less energy for storing the same amount of data.
As we’ve arrived at this conclusion, one may snort. “So what? Why can’t anyone with a laptop earn on renting their drive?” They undeniably can. But there’s much more to it than lower costs per HDD. Professional equipment takes less energy for storing the same amount of data. Not something that on a large scale can be shrugged off so easily, is it?
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