Topic: Mining resources hosting/leasing service, worth it? (Read 4452 times)

en route and few are still available.
Ordering more after the first ones arrive, and quantity depends upon preorders.

Also waiting on delivery for some 7970s

Ok youre right, do you have a bfl yet?

Yeah the exchange rate :/
Then again you need to add electrical, space, maintenance, failure rate etc. on the price of owned one.

I'm working on assumption that BFL Single MTBF is just 2years if lucky.
At 0.10$/kWh you are also spending ~70$ on electricity a year + the host machine. If you need A/C add another 30-50%.
Also BFL Single shipping is 34$

That already brings ownership of one for a year to over 700$

I based my maths on a 1.28 exchange rate.

I like it, but now it just seems cheaper to buy a bfl for 599 for life

Setup fees are PER item, never to be refunded. It's the upfront cost.

The rate per month stays same any billing cycle, so if you choose semi-annual payment cycle you pay monthly rate * 6 at that time, and again monthly rate * 6 after 6months.
Setup fee is *NON-RECURRING CHARGE*, and amount depends on payment cycle. If you choose monthly it is 175€, if you choose 6months or longer it is 75€

You also got your USD<>EUR exchange rate incorrect.

So, 6month payment is:
75€ setup fee: 100.50USD
6 months recurring charge: 49.95€*6=299.7€  or 401.60USD
Total: 502.10USD for first 6months
Then 401.60USD recurring charge.

*NOTE: It seems USD rate jumped today, just yesterday paypal quoted 1.26 when purchasing stuff from the US :/ That or Paypal has significantly increased their currency exchange profit margin. Latter is more likely.

Yeah I don't get it. Is it
$261 setup, never refunded, PER item?
$67/month BFL single
$57/month 7970

Updated the pricing post.

I still don't know what's so illogical/fussy about them people don't understand :/

Both emailed is fine. I'm still not clear on the pricing though. Could you polish that and add usd?

Just e-mail us with what item you want, and we'll sort it out for you.

Domain for this has been registered, and site will be put together probably during next week.

Now question is:
 * Do you prefer weekly e-mail of graphs vs. a live site?
 * Do you prefer to be able to set pools at anytime, or is support e-mail sufficient for starting?

I'm leaning towards coding a management interface, where you get live graphs, and can setup pools etc. That takes a bit of effort tho. (Especially since i have to code custom tailored CMS from scratch!)

I'm in

I'm new but i can vouch for Pulsedmedia's company when it comes to seedbox hosting. Pure professionalism, they care about their customers and their support and service is top notch in my books!

Good luck with your new venture, I hope this will take off

Already taking preorders. If you want to be ensured your spot and price now you can e-mail [email protected]

This is a very probable GO now, targeting first customers up & running by end of april.

Hardware en route or available already for sale:
 - BFL Single * 2  (Should arrive around end of april)
 - 7970 * 2
 - 5830 * 3
 - 5850 * 2
 - 5870 * 2
 - 6950 * 2
 - 6970 * 1
 - 6770 * 1

Preorders for hardware is very limited, usually 1 every 2 or 3 sold & delivered, unless we have already put a significant order in place.
BFL Singles will have longer lead time, and more preorders are accepted for them because it's important to get early on the queue.

New hardware will be ordered once a month, usually around end of month, so stock status will be updated at beginning of month.

Brand name is 90% likely chosen now with domains registered, but still considering alternatives.
Payments will be accepted in: SEPA Wiretransfers, Bitcoin, Paypal  and maybe others (Suggest!)

SLA & service specification will *probably* be changed so that we can shutdown the hardware on the few days in summer when temperature rise too high for evap cooling to be effective enough - these periods of downtime would be automatically be credited at least 100% if not at higher ratio. This will likely be limited to several hours a day (6max) for a total of ~10 days a year when temperatures creep well above 30C. Only time will show us will ambient stay low enough. Target GPU temperatures are 70C, and shutdown will happen on 80C.

Mhash based leasing is currently out of question due to the technical difficulties in operating such.

Services are VAT deductible upon request by submitting VAT ID. People outside Europe are not subject to VAT.

Updated Mhash/€ rates to the table. 7970 is based on quite low Mhash rating, testing will show what will be attained in practice per GPU.

It's easier to sort with just devices, but yeah, it could be marketed as such.
Those terms are created so that we can still reap the important reward -> upfront ROI on the HW.
Dropping setup fees would mean that we are essentially donating money
In any case, 75€ is not much!

That is some BAD electrical rate :O

I'd totally lease some BFL singles for you for a couple of months to try, but not wanting to take the risk on setup costs and a longer term contract for a new player in the market I'd be wary just now.
I don't like paying annually or semi-annually for hardware leasing anyway - lease my seedboxes and VPS on a month-by-month basis.

Essentially though, what you're offering is mining contracts. Why not just offer in terms of raw Mh/s rather than based on what sort of hardware it is?

Regardless, if you can sort out the issues, I'll be a customer - paying $0.33/KWH equivalent here 

+75€ if you want to pay monthly.

Exactly, i will keep them mining if there is no takers, so opportunity cost is very low.

I also get the 7970s substantially cheaper than say NewEgg listing price, that helps too

515.4€ = 670.02$ so it's barely above the GPU price for the 1st year. I fail to see how that is NOT a good deal for someone short in capital?

I pay around 0.11 USD/kwh after all the taxes and fees and such..

So if I understand, the numbers you give in the first post "7970: 515.4€" for 1 year paid in 6 month segments. At 0.18 USD/kwh it looks like it'll take you roughly 2 years to pay off the cards. Not bad I suppose if you already have the infrastructure and are able to keep those cards occupied by clients 100% of the time. When not rented by clients I suppose they could mine for your own account and you'll just have to hope that the price per bitcoin climbs out of this 5 USD/BTC plateau we seem to be at.

Will be interesting to see how your service turns out. I don't think I'll take advantage of it at this point as I think I have a way to get power at 0.07 to 0.08 USD/kwh which will make HD 5830s incredibly viable for myself.

From european individuals i have to charge 23% VAT
How much are you paying for electricity?

I was also thinking for serious miners a faster way to grow, as there is no serious upfront costs, just the operational.
For me the benefit would be from economies of scale and long term prospects.
That way you could get additional 6Ghash/s today instead of just 1Ghash/s for the same money paid today, as an example.

The 7970 1st year costs on this should be less than the GPU + Electricity cost even for most US based miners.

We shall see, a lot of this i have to setup in any case, and when it's all setup there might be interest all of sudden, and definitively would consider mainstreamers would be interested, those without know how or willingness to setup their own GPU farms, and those which just want to support Bitcoin and enjoy some profit at the go.

See if you pay 75€ setup + 43€ for the GPU to be brought online today for ~600Mhash/s, instead of paying ~450€ just to get the GPU, you can purchase full 2Ghash/s from me to have online TODAY. That equals the cost of SINGLE GPU. It leaves me to finance the remainder 3 GPUs + node + supportive/overhead hardware. Platinum cert PSUs are *NOT* cheap.

The difference is: 70$ or 280$ revenue on the first month.

First year 4xGPU Setup: 2060€ fees collected by me.
Cost of 4xGPU + PSU + Mobo + CPU + RAM @ Newegg is roughly: 1963€ excluding PCI-E risers, Fans, power cabling, electricity costs, space costs, CPU heatsink.
At 0.06$/kWh, if that system consumes 750W: 302€ for the year, combining for 2263€ costs for you (Plus what 100€ for the other HW, plus space?), meaning for 1st year you STILL get ahead.

In the end it is too expensive for most non-European users. Your very high power cost will require relatively high rates for this service for anyone outside of the EU. In the US by my calculations it costs me about $240 per HD 5830 for the card, the chassis to run it in(split across 5 cards) and then the power to run the card. I currently run out of my garage where I vent the waste heat(in winter months I had the cards in the basement to heat the house). I am looking at a small industrial warehouse with a pair of roof vent fans to run out of as my operation grows. This will drop my power costs as I'll be on an "industrial" plan instead of a residential plan so it further makes your operation cost ineffective to myself.

However! For Europeans who seem to have much higher power costs your service might be quite useful. The other case would be users who don't want to manage their farm as it grows. Unfortunately at this point though mining is mostly a hobby for some people and a serious investment for others. The first group enjoys running their farm, the second group saw this as a way to make money and would be turned off by losing possible profit.

Updated the pricing, lots of Q&A etc. on the 2nd posting.

Feedback is appreciated.

What kind of features you would hope to see from an operation like this?

I have few ideas to lower the pricing to a nicely low fees, yet make it profitable, by driving in some efficiencies of scale.

Payment methods would be Paypal € or BTC.
Also one thing to consider is providing other GPGPU or hashing applications. FPGAs probably cannot operate for anything else than Bitcoin, but GPUs could.

That provider puts money where it matters and not making things fancy, or excessively fine tuned.
Not sure how they handle fire suppression tho.

My point is that there is a balance on things.
I plan to utilize at max 20kW or so at this location, before choosing another one.
That is around 80Ghash/s.
Yes, not a tiny cluster, but not extremely large neither.

The whole point is to make things as economical as possible, not as fancy as possible.
You can have fancy right now, just build your rig into 4U case and take it to a DC, anyone can do it right now. However that does cost 100-200€ per rig a month. If i recall right it's 1100€ a month for rack with 16A @ Evoswitch (NL). Whoops, your operational costs just rose exponentially for: UPS, Fire suppression, 24/7 present staff (150€ per hour remote hands), AC etc etc etc.
Yet you don't get monitoring with it, but you have to monitor it yourself and make requests to DC remote hands, billed in 15min increments. So you need to hire a local guy to do that for you, here in Finland that is 2k €+ a mo for minimum wage guy, but you don't want minimum wage guy doing THAT JOB, riiiiight?

Are you getting where i'm going with this?

There will be a point where all of what you mention WILL be economical, but that day is not Before Launch.

Why most people don't host their hardware in a DC? Because of the cost of all those supplements. For almost every miner out there, it makes absolutely no sense. For some it does, for most it does.

Only reason you are not demanding these from mining contract is perception. Same risks exist for anyone who is having any sizeable mining operation.

1) Complete power cut off, ie. PDUs. Can be automatic with temperature sensors -> detect over 50C in any of the measure points -> something is seriously wrong.

2) Like i said, 24/7 video surveillance, tight lockdown. A non-issue.

3) 30mins is my normal from door to door travel time, i can make it in 20minutes in emergency. or less.
I'm a entrepreneur -> this WOULD BE my job, at least part of it. I can leave and come whenever i want, no problem at all. My responsibilities are 100% to customers.
3AM, 10AM, 5PM, whatever, nothing new. If sprinklers go off fire alarm is set off automatically, which goes remotely to fire station.

Actually, i'm quite curious how ridiculously tight requirements you are asking for bitcoin mining rigs, these are not mission critical financial servers, these are mining rigs. No one is going to die if they are down for a while, no one is going to go bankrupt, no one is going to have relatively high losses vs. time of downtime, no one is going to take PR damage (except me) for any downtime.

All of that asked can be provided, but price will then correlate:
That would be 7500€ per 7970 per year, thank you.
That will give you a fully HA setup, in 24/7 in location presence, with proper fire management, offsite backups, security guards on post 24/7. Minimum order is 50 units, minimum contract 3years.

Ask for enterprise level features -> get enterprise pricing.

Or is it sufficient for a bitcoin mining rig to have an annual 99.9% uptime (less than 9hrs downtime annually), where security for the budget far exceeds the expected norm, and any and all issues are replied & acted upon within the day, critical emergencies within an hour or two, at a sane cost.

99.9% of the dedicated server market does not offer what you are asking for.
Some providers run their DCs completely lights-out with hours to travel to location if need be. They still offer you 99.9% SLA, and many people use their services for something which would cost them with 1hr downtime more than annual revenue of 1Ghash/s of mining rigs.

Hell, i've seen (and used) DCs where ambient temp is 50C, with no fire suppression available, and anyone with knowledge it is there and intent could get into. Actually because one of the technicians forgot his keys, with 20minute effort we got through the door without any kind of keys. I admit, that place sucked MAJORLY.

BTW, worlds most successful server provider uses the quality level of DCs 90%+ "enterprise hosting" folks would laugh at. Yet their uptime levels at the very least is on par, usually exceeding this "enterprise" offers (disclosure: I have hundreds of servers there, which take less time to manage than just 10 servers at Leaseweb...)

oh and this warehouse, i already got there stuff worth tens of thousands of euros, if the place would be robbed or would burn down i would stand A LOT to loose.

You can shut off remotely, but can you respond fast enough so the equipment doesn't get wet while the power is still on? Keep in mind you need to cut off all power, because even if the rigs are "off", the power supply is still providing standby power to the motherboard. Or are you going to have it set up so all power is cut automatically in an event of a fire?

It's not just reacting to fire, you need to be close so you can monitor the site 24/7. It's a datacenter with over 50k worth of electronics, so burglary/vandalism is definitely an issue. A warehouse with tons of ventilation, spewing out hot exhaust is sure going to attract some attention.

Just because you live 30 minute away, doesn't mean you can deal with an emergency. Are you willing to leave work if a problem shows up? How about 3am in the morning, or right when you're eating dinner? Mining rigs are very risky investments, and bitcoin prices are very unstable, so it's all about getting the fastest ROI as possible. If it will take you 12 hours to respond to an event, your customers are not going to be happy.

A much better idea would be to sell mining contracts.

servers don't need that kind of observation - properly configured these do neither.
a 5k server room might go by months no one even visiting there!

If fire happens, i will most likely be able to shut down all nodes remotely, so when the sprinklers go off the hardware would be spared, just need to dry and test everything. Just in case i can't be there when the fire is starting up.

Seriously tho, computer hardware does not tend to catch up on fire spontaneously

and if this grows sufficiently, it's not that big of an investment relatively to setup electronics safe fire system (can't remember the name of the gas used).
If you got 40k € (ie. 100x7970) operating, 4k-8k € on a small fire supression system is not that bad of an investment anymore (10-20%) compared to a small 10x7970 operation.

That is exactly what I meant. If I was doing this sort of thing I would make sure to be there physically myself or leave someone there at all times to watch over the rigs. Even 30 minutes is a long time. A fire can start at any time and the sprinklers would destroy all the hardware I think. Maybe insurance could help.

Anyway feel free to carry on. I was just suggesting a feature you might consider adding for your customers. I certainly would not put my rigs anywhere without constant supervision by a person that lives at most 5 minutes away etc.

Not sure of your question. Do you mean a person available to goto the location 24/7? Well the 2nd location is just 22km from where i live - So yes Takes 30mins for me to drive there, and i do hang around there for other reasons once or twice a week when i can.
It functions as our warehouse, plus i assemble stuff there etc.

No matter what, i will be placing my own rigs there. Only thing scares me is the temperatures in end of July, early August.

Average summer temperature is just ~18C for past few years (VERY HOT relatively), 1971-2000 average summer temp 15.9C, 30km south of the location.

I would actually consider setting up something like this if it wasn't for the shipping costs, handling costs, maintenance needed etc.

Definitely need to have a dedicated person there 24/7 in case something goes wrong with so many miners and HW at your disposal etc. 

Do you have this OP ? 

A correction my electrical rate isn't 6 cents.  I was just saying I would colocate my mining hardware to your location if you could offer 6 cent electrical rates (plus some rent for cage space).

What competitors? I don't know of any in siberia.

electricity is still 50% less than yours. Mining doesn't require a fast connection, a dial-up line will probably work just fine. All you're doing is spreading FUD about your competitors.

I really don't, but i don't sleep, and i work 16hr days so ...
Many of the topics has been on my mind for a longer time.

I guess i'm just busy person, even tho i consider myself lazy! XD

Thing is, i enjoy doing research, doing new things, so the 16hrs a day spent doesn't feel like that bad, usually. Having employees helps aswell

BTW, did some cost analysis and the pricing is still ALL wrong on the table.
First year is the toughest, need ASAP HW ROI to supply to new customers, but with pricing making that possible it's not attractive, and self funding lasts only so far.
We have only secured funding for 4-6 units (BFL, Icarus/X6500 or 7970s) a month with 0 revenue for this endeavour.

My measurement period is 1year. With traditional hosting, with less risk i can achieve less than 1year HW ROI, this being riskier tho ... But GPUs are easier resale than servers. After 1st year i can probably get almost same price for GPUs than what i paid them for so ... For them i might lower the 1st year cost to something like 50% retail card price + operational costs. This would be 1st year competitive even for DaT!

Plus this doesn't require acquiring new locations etc. and there is always the backup that unused hardware can be mining for myself. And there is some other options i'm looking forward to investigate for additional revenue on this!

You sound like you have a lot of time on your hands to run this venture, and that's cool. Even discussing making your own UPSs. I wish I had that much time to play with hardware 

Updated the pricing again, fixed some flaws in the method of calculation. Still badly flawed tho!
Calculating hosting prices is not an easy task for something you don't have comparison base to, and most cost is in the HW, and HW lifetime.
Obviously paying setup + subscribing for an year might not make any sense at all.

"Submit your own HW" is possible too, and pricing would be something like:
75€ setup on any GPU (To cover PSU, Mobo, cooling etc.!)
BFL Single: 11€
Icarus/X6500: 5€
Z-Tex: 4€ (Obviously too low if you need support even once)
7970: 23€
6770: 14€
5830: 24€

for FPGA i would also need to setup casing etc.
No HW Insurance/Replacements included, if it fails we'd ship the GPU/FPGA back to you, and you can ship us an replacement or fix it. Only disaster insurance covered as per our insurance company.
Some simple things tho we can do for you, ie. swap GPU cooler or apply new thermal paste.

Wow that is one mighty low electrical rate!

So your 1st year cost for 7970 with assumed 150W with overheads and GPU cost of 530$ is about: 608$! 467€ ... Wow. That is amazing!
My electricity cost alone is 170€ / 221$. And they say Finland is the promised country of Cloud ....

In your case you would however benefit from less hassle, but that's it.

I intend to spend a lot of extra effort on enhancing Mhash/W ratio, and find my competitive edge on electricity pricing there
That means going as far as minizing quantity of fans, replacing all fans with larger, higher efficiency ones.
During winter, all but GPU fans would be disabled too, and i expect GPU fans to be running real slow.
Problem really is that need to make sure the ambient stays above 4C (Yes, i AM serious). First winter i expect some sleepless nights at the farm measuring temperatures.
One solution is to use tons of electronics varnish, and simply let the ambient to go -20C but i'm not a fan of that idea.

That can easily save 10-20W per 3-4GPUs from fans alone. Low ambient will help shave off another couple W per GPU.
Increased spacing will help too.

Undervolt, underclock the CPUs & RAM, find smallest ram sizes available etc.
Test and benchmark the sweet spot of Mhash VS. W per type of GPU.

I'm actually expecting to achieve a total efficiency of more than 4Mhash/W with GPUs on the newer gear!
But only research will show will that be achieved.

I also have an idea to decrease the overhead per GPU down to around 9W @ wall

So? How many Siberians you know even being able to do this?
Even tho that is the case, for example google setup one huge DC here ...
France has high electricity costs, yet probably the biggest hosting company in Europe operates from France ...
Netherlands has likely the highest electricity costs in Europe, yet is the Europes "Internet Hub" meaning best connectivity there, and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of large and small hosting companies, one of europes largest providers too is there.

Just because Siberians can get that, does not mean it will happen.
For example, they might have very flaky electricity, hard to get HW delivered, too big distances, if electricity goes down it might be down for how many weeks??
How about internet connectivity? Satellite? yeah....

Anything hosting requires reliable power and reliable connectivity, and distances seem to have an indirect relation (length of power, copper, fiber lines)

Tho, if they have none of those downsides.... Well, it's russia and has it's own cultural phenomenons.

And no i don't need to be able to sell to 100% of world population, no business would ever start if they'd expect to offers to be lucrative for 100% of world population.

Then #3 is really your only real issue.  Electricity is the one variable that defines marginal miners and profitable ones. 

Still it may be viable.  People who have higher electrical costs and/or lack the skill, spaces, resources may find it desirable.

Bad luck of the (electrical) draw.  If you had everything the same and operated in Wyoming with <6 cent electrical rates I might ship all my equipment to you and rent a cage.

but still, Siberians can get sub 8 cent AND have cold climate.

Oh yeah, forgot that the electricity is charged annually at the 2nd location, that gives us an advantage because we can get for the electricity price an average of 6% interest over the year, rather safely too!
Tho, likely we would save the electricity funds in this proportion: 25% BTC, 25% Stock/Investments (Rather liquid, but has an inherent risk), 25% Liquid Funds & Bonds, 25% cash or further HW investments expected to gain 100%+ in cashflow before electricity is due (January of each year) (100%+ received on HW does not mean it's been paid off).

1) Trust is non-issue. We are a finnish registered company, and doing fraud like that i would be personally liable in the court. Our VAT ID is: FI22551954
We got thousands of customers, so any trust issues are extremely bad for us. We've acted even on hints of trust issues within 24hrs in the past, hints caused by people who dislike our success.

2) Already got insurance up to 1million euro. Electronic friendly fire protection not right now, we got fire protection, just not electronics friendly. Good point.
Dedicated warehouse space: That 150m2 location More is available fast, or with some searching cheap.
24/7 security: Camera surveillance, including online. Access very limited, "off the beaten path". Cops visit occasionally the parking lot, along with security company which visits couple times a night.

3) Unfortunately that is impossible pricing at Finland, alone the electricity added tax is is about 0.03$/kWh. Like said, upside is no need for AC.
If 100% gain from no need for AC, that already drops effective price to ~0.13$/kWh.
AC is certainly not needed 10months of a year. Infact, problem might be we still might need some HEATING during 3-4months of a year! :O

On the upside we don't need AC, and even tho office has AC it's not calced in because it would have this in any case and i could put the FPGAs on another room to get the load off the AC.
Summer fans + evap should be more than sufficient for the GPU farm.

Assume 100% gain on that, it's 30% cost savings.

Floor space is also extremely cheap. Basic nodes are extremely cheap. UPS costs a bit if done, but not that bad.
A lot of things are very cheap infact, but power is not one of them.

Also on another upside, some people are not capable to run their own miners, skillwise or space wise. Also with us you'd have less upfront costs. The setup fees need to be adjusted tho, or 2 levels offered, roughly 50% of HW cost, 100% of HW cost.

You also get "insurance" in the sense that HW will be replaced free of charge if failed. The monthly fees cover this.
If a particular GPU is unavailable it will be upgraded to similar price & W/Mhash free of charge, or the setup fee considered for 12-24months "value" and prorata credit towards next device.

Grown enough, delivery times will be also completely different than waiting for your own hardware etc.

There are three major concerns.

1) Trust.  Best prices are for contract up front.  Collect a lot of contracts and disapear.  

2) Non-linear cost.  Are you going to have insurance, electronic friendly fire protection, dedicated warehouse space, 24 hour security?  As the operation scales the risks scale too and without mitigation those risks are simply passed to customers.

3) Electricity is the most important geo dependent variable.  If this did make sense it would make sense in a sub 8 cent per kWh area.  Otherwise it is more risk and cost for a less efficient operation.

Ya, that's going to be a problem.  Probably even a show-stopper level problem.

Pricing Edited 14/03/2012

Starting to near final production costs + prices IMHO.
Options for +~50% setup fee of hardware value for lower monthly will be provided if there is demand.

Setup fees: 195€ for billing terms monthly & quarterly, 75€ for longer cycles (6months, 12months).
RATES:
BFL Single: 49.95€
Icarus/X6500: 37.95€
Z-Tex: 29.95€
7970: 42.95€
6770: 19.95€
5830: 33.95€ ** TO BE VERIFIED -> Unknown power consumption per GPU

Quarterly rate(3 months): Monthly rate * 3
Semi-annual rate(6 months): Monthly rate * 6
Annual rate(12 months): Monthly rate * 12
PRICES IN USD: RATE * 1.34   (Xe.com 27th of March)



Which results in Mhash per € costs:
BFL Single: 16.61Mhash / €
Icarus/X6500: 10.01Mhash / €
Z-Tex: 7.01Mhash / €
7970: 12.80Mhash / €
6770: 10.02Mhash / €
5830: 9.43Mhash / €

This means that at 6month payment cycle (no setup fee later on), your effective 1st year costs would be, including overheads, electricts etc etc, only the single payment, no hidden charges:
BFL Single: 599.4€
Icarus: 455.4€
Z-Tex: 359.€
7970: 515.4€
6770: 239.4€
5830: 407.4€

Expect 2-4% lower price on 12month payment cycle.

All prices exclude VAT 23%
Reseller options will be featured. Bulk discounts will be offered. Please contact me for additional information.

The important questions are ....
How can you offer below HW costs?
Economies of scale, long term goals. The HW payoff is set far into the 2nd year, only thing that matters is positive constant cash flow.
Standardized setups will allow us to spend a lot of R&D to push through more efficiency.
For europeans just acquiring the HW will cost more than the annual price! Slight difference, but not much.
This kind of pricing will allow bigger operators to scale faster if supplies last.

Why, oh why? Couldn't you just mine and earn more?
Likely, yes. But this often yields revenue upfront vs. mining which is constant small flow. Also there will be some HW to hash for ourselves, but that is mostly the items which is waiting to be provisioned/burn-in test, old HW, testing setups etc. which might yield for us at some points of time even 10Ghash/s+ in burn-in testing!
Also, this will yield something which i appreciate: Known, stable return on investment. BTC value goes up & down, and we would at times need to wait months before we could sell BTC, making scaling efforts really slow at times. Personally, i prefer to hold on to my BTC anyway!

When?
Proof of concepts will be built by end of April, launch shortly there after. Some beta accounts will be available.
Full sales should begin no later than end of August, targeting 1st of June.
What we need to do is:

• Web interface
• Interface pool setup
• Lots and Lots of statistics and graphs
• HW testing, finalizing setups and verifying the average GPU can work at the clocks we want to
• Setup GPU farm location ready to accept nodes: building shelves, wiring, ensure stability etc.
• API for advanced users
• Website + billing (graphics being the most time consuming)
• Setup other usage options for GPGPU, ie. Folding@Home

What if no one is interested?
Doesn't matter, we'll just mine bitcoins for ourselves then Sure then a lot of hours will be wasted into research and development which would have not otherwise been done, but overally i consider the opportunity costs to be rather fair.

Who can get an beta account?
Those who can give us productive feedback, only a few will be accepted

How are you able to finance this?
We are an established hosting company with some options for self financing few ghash growth per month on average without affecting other operations at all.
If demand is great we might accept a limited amount of preordering, preorders would be limited to something which we can handle to provide within a ~month, not 4-6months
For FPGAs the queue might be longer due to the nature of FPGAs arriving in batches, and there is no constant supply.
Shipments from US (ie. BFL Single) happens only once every 1-2months as well because it makes no sense to have small shipments from our US warehouse.

Do i get HW access, so can i OC the GPUs?
NO! OC'ng will make the lifespan of the GPU far shorter, in extreme cases into just weeks instead of years, nevermind the increased wattage and lower Mhash/W ratio. Further, there is group of people who doesn't give a shit about others and will kill the GPUs in a month if it yields them even 0.1€ more revenue, and would cause expenses to skyrocket with constant RMAs and replacement HW purchases (You can RMA single GPU only so many times ...). Further crash of single GPU causes whole node to crash, likely causing downtime for other customers on the same node as well.
That being said, we are targeting high performance, for example 600-650Mhash for 7970, if not more. Final testing will show.
FPGAs will run at the rates they are delivered, or in case of X6500 what every unit can run with combined few % safety margin, likely 190-200Mhz range. Icarus will yield ~380Mhash, BFL Single ~830.

Scale maximum?
2012 Fall: Current locations will be scaled to a total of approximately: 20Ghash/s in GPUs and 20Ghash/s for FPGAs.
2012 Winter: 60Ghash/s in GPUs utilizing current locations (Requires new electric circuits). FPGAs can be temporarily be hosted where GPUs are.
2013: Likely new location will be acquired, scouting will take a little bit of time. New location will add a minimum of ~20kW capacity at the start (80 to 200Ghash/s), but might require AC for cooling. We have a potential backup location with 6kW capacity available. We will acquire similar locations on as-needed basis.

I've been thinking about this since last summer, but it brought up again lately and realized this might make a lot of sense for some people.

My idea is to offer mining hardware for hosted lease, with some customization options, and a range of products to choose, from GPUs to FPGAs.
Pricing would be set according to real world pricing and cost to operate and acquire the hardware - not by the potential BTC mining results.

You would directly pay for the mining hardware, not the infrastructure etc. you wouldn't need to care yourself about the physical setup etc.
Price would include hardware replacements, service level agreement, and all the overheads needed to operate something like this.
You wouldn't not need to worry about anything else than "What pools do i want to use?".

You would get access to RRD graphs of YOUR cluster, with each device listed and total graphs.
At later point we will also enable you to change pool configurations on the fly for yourself, and for the whole cluster - maybe also some other configuration options to a limit.
The performance would be managed by us, meaning we first optimize it for best MH/W combination.

The biggest drawback is that electricity is rather expensive for us - 0.18$/kWh in primary location for GPUs and 0.16$/kWh where a small cluster of FPGAs will be set up (office). The upside is that we don't need AC being located near to the arctic circle

Office has AC so FPGAs will run cool, with low rejects and high speeds.

The SLA would cover:
 * Network uptime
 * Hardware uptime
 * Hardware replacements

Support is 24/7 for basic questions, hardware technical (replacements) is ~12/7, commercial is available ~12/5 (business days)

Capacity to grow offsite location is up to around 100kW (cooling limited), office 7kW.
Offsite location has 24/7 recording camera surveillance as well.

GPUs already available or en-route:

• 5830
• 5850
• 5870
• 6950
• 6770
• 7970

All current FPGA options will be made available, with longer delivery times:

• BFL Single
• Icarus
• X6500
• Z-Tex

Some GPUs will be upgraded with better after market coolers if the temperatures raise too high. Target is to keep them below 70C.

Offsite location will likely also feature UPS backup at a later date.
Office will likely NOT have UPS for the FPGAs