3. Estimated Competitive Price: Unavailable

Estimated Competitive Price: Unavailable

  • T

    Hi!

    Recently I've found out about Sia and I'm pretty excited about the project.
    I set up a host with my spare storage space and announced it, and everything seems to work good.

    My question however is about price settings.

    From my understanding, to set a competitive price (such that to increase the chance that someone will rent your storage) one must be aware about the market state. If you know what are current prices, you can modify yours appropriately. Otherwise you'll almost certainly set price that is too high or too low.

    However I was not able to find where I can get info about current Sia storage prices, or at least about last active contracts. Which is a bit weird considering Sia is a free p2p market of storage.

    Also ./siac host -v has told me:

    General Info:
    Estimated Competitive Price: Unavailable

    What may mean that this is unavailable on purpose, estimation is not implemented yet, or I have problems with configuration.

    For now I am running a host on default settings with hope that they are close to real ones.

    So, is there a way to get information about current storage prices or last activated contracts on Sia?

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  • T

    OK, I missed this one: http://siapulse.com/page/network :)

    But anyway I wonder why there is "Estimated Competitive Price: Unavailable".

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  • admins

    You need to be running a renter to get a price estimation from the host. If you don't want to run a renter, using siapulse.com is the next best thing.

    But, even this is not great because every host has different advantages (download speeds, latencies to various cities/areas, etc.) and every renter is looking for something different. Compounding that, the network in general is pretty underutilized, so your host is probably not going to get much attention even if your prices are competitive.

    We're working on some tools that will make it easier to set the optimal price as a host, but for now we're mostly focused on the renting experience because really the network needs a lot more utilization before hosting will be profitable at practical scales.

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  • T

    Thanks for explanation.

    Yes, after I started renter module, estimation appeared.

    So the storage allocation for renter and contracts activation are not directly controlled by renter?
    Renter says like "I'm ready to spend 5 KS for storage" and Sia says "you'll get 100 GB". Then renter just uploads/downloads files and everything else is performed automatically. Is that right?

    And if so, will there be more configuration options for renter in the future? Like max price per storage, min/max duration etc. ?

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  • admins

    yeah. The whole process is a bit involved, but basically when you allocate an allowance of like 5KS to Sia, you form a bunch of contracts with hosts allocating a total of approximately 5 KS. Based on the host prices, you get an estimate for how much storage you will be able to upload. This can be affected by how frequently you download things, etc.

    The graphical interface for the renter will likely never have all that much customization, we aren't really targeting high customizability with our graphical client. However, the API is a different story, and we do plan on adding a bunch of customization that third-party apps and developers can utilize.

    Already the API is a lot more powerful than what the GUI allows you to do (for example, the GUI sets the redundancy for you, but in the API you can add your own redundancy settings).

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