About hosting on Sia

Learn about the concepts and terms you'll need to be familiar with to host on the Sia network.

Hosting means you are contributing your excess storage space to the Sia network. You're helping to keep data where it belongs – safely in the hands of those who uploaded it, the renters.

You also earn Siacoins, the cryptocurrency that powers the Sia network. Siacoins can be used to purchase your own storage space, or converted to other cryptocurrency or fiat on crypto exchanges.

Hosts are a critical part of the ecosystem. You are contributing to the decentralized network that is the heart of Sia. Hosting is also more technical a process than renting, and while anyone can fairly easily set it up, there's a lot you'll want to know to maximize your setup.

Pricing

As a host, you set your own prices. There's a lot of specific price points you can control:

  • Storage Price: The base price for your storage, per TB/month.

  • Contract Fees: A small, one-time fee per contract to cover network transaction costs.

  • Upload/Download Bandwidth Price: Your price for upload or download bandwidth to and from your host, per TB.

  • Collateral: How many Siacoins you're willing to lose if you don't fulfill the rental contract, per TB.

About Contracts

Storage contracts are one of the most important features of the Sia network. They are what allow the entire Sia ecosystem to work in a trustless way – they form blockchain-enforced contracts between you and the people who rent your storage space that are automatically fulfilled.

Earn Siacoins

As a host, you're part of a marketplace where you compete with other hosts for renter contracts. Competition should drive prices down, and demand should drive prices up. The goal is a market where people can upload their data with maximum security, minimum cost, and at fair rates that provide revenue to the hosts.

Fees

As a host, you earn Siacoin for the storage space that you sell. But in order to create additional incentive for hosts to be good hosts and sustain a reliable network, you also put up collateral.

  • Collateral – An amount of Siacoins that you're willing to lose if you aren't a good host.

Having collateral incentivizes hosts to be online and to keep their renter data intact. Hosts that go offline or lose data lose their collateral, and hosts that stay online and keep data safe get their collateral back.

Host Scoring

One of the most important factors that determine how you'll fair as a host is your host score. This is based on a number of metrics – some that you can directly affect, some that improve or diminish over time based on your performance.

Sia is a decentralized network - the code to evaluate these scoring metrics is contained within each renter's Sia instance. For that reason, each Sia renter you encounter builds their own host score for your host, so your host may be scored differently among different renters. Your host does not have one single overall score across the Sia network, but instead many scores with many renters based on the metrics described below. Any website or service showing your Sia host rank is showing that particular source's view of your host, which may be different from what a renter comes up with.

Specific Metrics

Host uptime is an incredibly important metric. You need to be online when people try to get their data, and since that might be anytime, you should be online all the time. You're allowed a small amount of downtime in order to address minor maintenance issues like restarting for updates, which amounts to approximately 14 hours per month.

In general, you should plan for your hosting computer to be turned on and online 24/7. If you can't commit to this, you shouldn't try to host on the Sia network.

Warning: If you go offline for too long (less than 95% uptime) or lose renter data (by deleting it or experiencing a hardware failure), you can lose money by losing your collateral for active contracts. You can also become responsible for SiaFund fees for each contract.

Below are the exact amounts that your score will change based on your uptime percentage. Greater than 98% uptime results in no penalty, which is the 14 hours a month explained above (2% of 720 hours in a month = 14 hours).

There are more values we could include in this table, but there's not much point. If you can't maintain a minimum of 95% uptime, don't host.

Third-Party Host Scoring

We have an incredible community building on Sia. Third-party sites can develop their own methods for scoring hosts based on various metrics. For example, SiaStats has developed a Host Monitor which evaluates hosts on pricing relative to other hosts, and even evaluates host performance regularly by forming contracts with every host it can in order to test bandwidth and latency. SiaStats even has great visualization for each host to make judging their metrics easier.

These benchmarks are different from the core Sia protocol, but are still useful, and may be used to help monitor and improve your own host over time.

Once you've started hosting, you'll probably want to keep an eye on your host score and see how you might be able to improve your host ranking.

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