Profitability of a Sia Host
Running a host on the Sia network continues to become easier and easier thanks to constant updates from the Sia core team, improved benchmarking and tracking from SiaStats, and now Sia Host Manager. With the recent influx of stored data on the Sia network more users are beginning to question if hosting is a profitable way to earn Siacoin.
To provide more data to the community and make the hosting ecosystem more transparent my personal Sia node’s revenue, utilization and contracts will be published and updated every hour at https://hostrevenue.siacentral.com
As more snapshots are taken, monthly and yearly charts will be added.
How I set my Host’s prices
The average pricing on the network is currently very low. 80 hosts are storing data for less than $0.10 USD/TB/month. Rather than follow the network in a race to the bottom, I have chosen to set my rates to what I believe to be competitive with traditional storage providers. BackBlaze B2 is one of the cheapest traditional cloud storage services at $5 USD/TB/month. A terabyte of data can be downloaded for $10.00 USD.
Renters on the Sia network store at least 3 copies of their data to provide redundancy and availability comparable to traditional storage providers. Unfortunately, that means the price per TB of Sia host’s needs to be about 1/3 the price of competing providers. That sets an upper bound just under $2 USD/TB/month to remain competitive with BackBlaze B2.
The pricing for B2, S3, and Azure reflects a heavy tax on data leaving their services. Sia seems to be used primarily for offsite cold storage now, but as more tools and services build on top of the network and more features such as file sharing are released by the core team data egress has the potential to be a much more lucrative revenue stream for hosts.
Average Pricing:
- Storage: $0.40 USD/TB/month
- Upload: $0.094 USD/TB
- Download: $0.22 USD/TB
My Pricing:
- Storage: $1.00 USD/TB/month
- Upload: $0.25/TB
- Download: $3.00/TB
Just how much can a new host expect to earn?
Currently, hosting on the Sia network is not profitable. Especially not when factoring in things like electricity in most nations. Most hosts are hosting at a loss for the good of the network. The most data stored on a single host is 12 TB. That host is charging about $0.15 USD/TB/month. That’s just under $2 USD/month. Too low to make hosting lucrative.
Even with higher pricing, new hosts should not expect any income at all for the first 3 months of hosting. Renters will be less likely to form contracts with a host until it has proven it is active and accessible by staying online.
In addition, Sia only pays hosts at the end of a storage contract. If the host goes offline or fails to submit proof that it has stored the data any revenue and collateral is lost. My host has failed 8 contracts for various reasons. Luckily it totals only $0.25 USD, but still a loss.
Even after 3 months, income will only begin to trickle in. Sia has a large supply of storage available but very low demand. Usage has been steadily increasing over the past few months as more people explore and test the Sia network. Very promising for future profits as a host. Nearly 100 TB of data was added to the network in the past 30 days.
As an active Sia host, I am not expecting to earn much in return, yet. My pricing reflects what I believe to be a reasonable price for storing data on my server. Hopefully publishing snapshots of my host’s financials will help bring more transparency to hosting on the Sia network.
