Is SiaPulse Accurate?
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http://siapulse.com/page/network is showing a meager total of 69 hosts in the last 6hrs, with 1045TB available and 0.52% of it used.
It seems like Sia as a storage solution is vastly underutilized even with only a few dozen hosts worldwide?
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I am the maintainer of SiaPulse. You are correct to observe that storage supply is much higher than demand. The numbers you mention are correct, though there are some intra-day variations. At time of writing, the host count is 73 hosts. This number is unlikely to grow significantly until demand picks up, because only then will hosts fill up at reasonable rates and make them profitable. Right now, running a host is not profitable.
It is unfortunate demand is so low, because the network is actually quite good at storing data. I store in excess of 0.7 TB on the network. The reason so few are uploading to the network is, I believe, down to a lack of tool/apps that takes the hassle out of uploading. To upload files you need to manually them in the Sia UI. There is no set-and-forget folder synchronization features in the UI. I wrote my own tool to do this (https://github.com/pmknutsen/gnome-shell-sia) but it is not widely used (because its written for a not widely used platform).
It has been said many times that Sia is not a consumer application, but better suited for big-data enterprises/institutions. Also, you can develop abstraction layers that offer backup / cloud storage apps on top of the Sia protocol, e.g. http://minebox.io. When these applications/hardware solutions mature I think we will see a dramatic uptick in utilization on the network.