After having a meeting with colleagues(seperate entities) in a brainstorming session that took over 7 hours, I was compelled to share the following with my genius friends here in the forum to chew on... hope it helps someone...
We had a Pow-wow discussion about the hosting situation at KNC, which we had been excited about such a great deal because our electrical costs here alone seemed to make hosting a bargain. (.43/kwhr is 309.60/month for a Jupiter), so for $350 a month, that's like paying $40.40 per month for hosting a Jupiter with the "Dream Team" as we call KNC...
Then we got the bad news.
Hosting will be up-front. This changes everything.
Ultimately, we decided against having KNC host the 3 Saturns we ordered for the following reasons...
1. The UP-Front policy changed the ROI drastically.
a. Hosting 3 Saturns for 6 months costs 4200 dollars... up-front
b. Buying another Saturn costs $3,897.60 here in Hawaii with shipping. (see where I'm going with this?)
2. Here in Hawaii, the electric cost is the among the highest in the world, literally .43/kw/hr, which comes to $464.40/month for the original 3 Saturns just for electric, or $154.80/month/Saturn; which comes to $928.80 in electric over the six month contract term for each Saturn here in Hawaii. That's a difference of $3,271.20 over the 6 month hosting fee, which is the actual cost of hosting a single Saturn after electric for us.
3. Now, instead of spending the $4,200.00 on hosting, if we simply bought another Saturn, we would have increased our hash-rate by 25% (200Gh/s)over that six months for $3,897.60. With a projected ROI of 30 days,(We feel an modest estimate) that would leave us with over 300 dollars, and 5 months of pure hashing profit over the same six months, not to mention that we still have the machine hashing long after that.
To put it more simply; Consider the comparison of up-front hosting fees against the lifetime income potential of the machine, minus electric.
We argued other points, like how much we could make in the few days it took to ship versus hosting, which was an attractive point since we are literally on the other side of the world, and what we could stand to loose if the package took 10 to 14 days to arrive.... but with every calculation, the numbers were negligible in comparison to the lifetime ownership of another machine.
Now, if We were able to pay on a month-to month basis during the 6 month term, we would have certainly went for hosting straight away, due to the drastically lower start-up costs. (Hint to Sam & Andreas)
thanks for the breakdown of the numbers. Good stuff.
in Feb 500$ stop being funny 
