I spoke with a few data centers before I decided to go the route of launching my own spot. One of them made me sign an NDA and offered up a very special rate because they'd like to play ball with some miners and see how it works. Despite being discounted from what they normally charge their larger enterprise customers, it was still very pricy. Technically still profitable if you crunch the numbers... but the margins were tighter than you'd want them to be. If BTC runs down to about $7,000 it starts to get uncomfortable... and based on our math anything  < $5,800 BTC would be in the negative (assuming the conversation is centered on S9's of course).

Couple that with the long commitment... you're paying that monthly hosting bill even if you shut the machines off and wait for BTC to climb.

One we spoke to was a little more reasonable, but wanted to charge $75/hour for any staff intervention at all, so you run the risk of losing money on expensive reboots or troubleshooting if a machine has issues. And they wanted commitments in half-rack increments. Ugh.

Every bit of math we've crunched puts us at better odds hosting in our own facility. We can control cooling and heat exhaust in the exact manner we see fit, our costs are the space + raw power, and insurance (which we pay anyway, based on where we're at now).

$172/mo per S9 seems a little steep. Depending on power costs, that's roughly a $70-90 markup over power. Maybe justifiable over the long-term, maybe not. If you have to involve a group of other folks to do it with you, that's even messier.

Just some thoughts...