Quote from: killerstorm on March 13, 2016, 11:46:18 PM

Sia usage report #2.

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Now I wanted to see if I can use it for something practical: backup. So I used it to upload 3 files 28 GB total.

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So, overall, I'm not going to actually use Sia for backups this time as it's more expensive than cloud storage providers. But it definitely looks promising.

I think it is fair to say that, in its current form, Sia is not ready for real-world use. First off, there are synchronization issues, excessive RAM usage and very limited scaleability.

Synchronization issues have largely been fixed in the 0.5.2 release candidate that came out today. The other problems are being worked on too.

What you describe is, therefore, the expected performance of Sia. There are no real surprises here.

I in no way intend to say your report is misleading. I think it represents a valid snapshot of how Sia is performing right now. But, Sia is in beta, its a work-in-progress with many known issues and both demand and supply is restrained because of these known issues. So, just as you cannot judge the soup before it has been cooked, wait for your judgement of Sia until the product is ready for real-world use.

What you mention about the cost of storage on Sia is a consequence of all this. What you have is a protocol that does not quite scale, and a reference implementation that is slow and heavy on system resources. As a consequence, not many are uploading content to the Sia network right now. In fact, the developers have asked users to refrain from uploading large amounts of content.

So, with low demand comes of course low supply (of storage). Some of the remaining storage providers are very cheap, others expensive. Most importantly, the low numbers of storage providers increase the amount of redundancy you need to guarantee that files are retrievable. Currently, that redundancy sits at x6, meaning each file you uploaded is duplicated 6 times over! Also, there is not much of a choice available when it comes to selecting which hosts you upload to, as each file has to be split among ~20 hosts. When the number of hosts climb above 100, redundancy can be decreased to x1.5. With an increasing number of hosts then, storage supply will grow, competition among hosts stiffen and prices therefore drop.