After some consideration we decided to announce availability of miner hosting at our facility again.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5404764

Sunbreak Electronics LLC is a datacenter located in Oregon

We started hosting mining equipment back in late 2014 as JeffColo, in 2017 we started Sunbreak Electronics LLC and built a new facility - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1467198.0

Our facility was designed to be a mixed use wholesale colocation datacenter for businesses and individuals who are sensitive to power costs and equipment sales tax.

Electrical expenses are paid directly to the utility and you only pay the datacenter for the space and connectivity you are leasing.

We have 48 openings for wholesale colocation right now.

Each colocation package is available for $1600/month and includes

- Metered Utility Service - 200A 3P 208 VAC ( Paid direct to utility @ ~$0.05/kWh )
- ASHRAE Class A1 Environmental Control ( 59F - 89F, 73F Typical, 20% - 80% RH )
- 2 x 42U APC 3150N 19" Racks

Adjacent pairs of racks are available on a diverse power path. This allows for combined or redundant power delivery to 4 racks.

This colocation utilizes pressurized hot aisles. Diligent use of blanking panels and careful attention to fan selection is necessary to operate correctly.

Can be used for crypto currency mining, hyperscalers, AI, big data or something else of similar power density.

Full selection of communications services available

- Dark fiber (Astound, CBX, WIN)
- DWDM (Pittock, Stack, EdgeConnex)
- L2 transport (Portland, Fremont, Atlanta, Ashburn, Jacksonville, San Juan)
- IP transit 1 Gbps - 400 Gbps
- NWAX

About our power

Our power is carbon free and comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, here is their resource mix;

https://www.bpa.gov/-/media/Aep/power/fuel-mix/bpa-official-fuel-mix-2020.pdf

Additional services available in Portland, Fremont, Atlanta, Ashburn, Jacksonville, San Juan

- Bare metal servers
- Virtual private servers
- Large data storage
- Colocation

Payments

- PayPal (3% Added Fee)
- Bitcoin

Shipping

You can ship directly to us from the manufacturer and experience no sales tax.

Current Availability

< EMPTY LIST >

We are accepting capacity reservations for new clients. I will be frequently updating the list above to reflect our current capacity.

Send hosting requests to hosting@jeffcolo.net

I have to agree. Back in 2017 we started construction on a general purpose datacenter in Oregon rather than a mining specific one. Between 2017-2020, crypto miners were the bulk of our revenue, but it was also the hardest earned and the most inconsistent.

The boom/bust cycle of crypto is difficult for any datacenter to accommodate. Just for historical context, in November 2018 the market dropped below profitability for our customers. Overnight everyone was asking us to turn their machines off, so we did. Unfortunately that also meant nearly 100% of our revenue stopped.

At the time, my colleague argued that if none of our customers were paying, we should evict them, have them collect their equipment and reclaim the space. However it would have been counter productive, there was absolutely zero demand to host new mining equipment. Which was pretty evident as some of our customers tried to sell their equipment with little success.

After 6 months, in May 2019 the price did turn around and all of our customers took control of their machines again. Unfortunately this only lasted 5 months until November 2019 when increasing difficulty forced all of our customers to shut off again. In June 2020 the halving occurred, which pretty much assured that equipment was never getting powered on again.

Over the course of operating 24 months, we only generated a profit for a combined 10 months. The other 14 months with non-paying "idle" customers consumed whatever profit we had managed to make previously and took us negative into the red.

Today we have almost no crypto customers, although we do have a growing number of "traditional" datacenter customers. If we hadn't built the facility with customer diversity in mind we would have perished like everyone else.

Which brings me to my point, the "mining facility" concept has little chance to succeed even with scales 10 MW and beyond. Even when you have low priced power, there are unavoidable overheads. Rent or mortgage payments, construction loans, staffing costs, local taxes, licensing, insurance, accounting fees, property tax, etc.

Obviously there are some economies of scale that can help average these costs out, but we have found that beyond a certain scale the cost actually goes up. There are a lot of cost saving opportunities when don't have to buy everything new, pay premiums for expediting construction, permits, lawyers, etc.

No matter how you balance it, you always end up paying ~$0.04/kWh in overhead.

- Want to mine at home? Then your stuck paying for retail power with a 50% premium over commercial
- Found a mining facility with super cheap hosting in some remote country? Now your exposed to a very likely risk of losing your equipment.
- Found a warehouse to rent for $2k/month with 400 amps of power? That's $4k/month in power that your paying almost a 50% premium on.
- Decided to go big! Get a loan for $3M to build a 10 MW facility. Paying your loan is equivalent to paying a 50% premium on power for 24-36 months.

Ironically, I have been considering hosting mining customers again now that they aren't critical to the success of our business. I just need to find a creative way to more appropriately split the risk between hosting provider and miner.

What super cheap method did you come up with for water cooling. All in all everything you have described is identical to what i'm doing, telco rack and all.

clap clap clap ...

Very nice, very cheap, very functional, great airflow, good spacing. I applaud you sir.

Oh ... what kind of tubing? How strong is it? Sounds like you are referring to some kind of plastic tubing?

I got some really thin wall aluminium tubing that I used a tubing cutter to make 2.2" spacers so I wouldn't have to use so damned many hex nuts. The result is questionable, it certainly has extra rigidity good for supporting 6 dual gpu cards (5970,6990,7990?). The design in the picture above doesn't have a whole lot of extra support on the outer most cards. The problem with the aluminium tubing is that it doesn't sit on a #6 washer very well. I was putting a washer between the extender pcb and the spacer and when I tightened the nut down on either end it did not straighten like I expected it to.

Plus there wasn't enough thread on a 12" peice of all-thread with nut, washer, pcb, washer, spacer, washer, pcb, washer, spacer.

So I removed all the washers except the ones on the outside ends. Tightened it up and it looked good, but the spacers ends are not much bigger then the pcb hole and they are rather sharp from the tubing cutter so I'm a little worried about extra strain on the pcb. Then again aluminium at this wall thickness is very very soft and it probably just flattened against the surface of the pcb.

I plan on placing motherboards so that I extend the back plane and can use a union to join one set of rails to another so I have motherboard to motherboard support while still allowing me to move 6 gpu segments off the rail for motherboard replacement, whatever.

In all I'm not totally happy with the aluminium spacers (not stiff enough), nor the zinc plated all-thread (too flimsy) or the 4" 6-32 bolts (too short) I'm using for posts. Plus I'm worried about corrosion and honestly I'm not a fan of cheap steal bolts. So I'm reworking the design to use stainless all-thread with stainless lock nuts and no bolts. I also want to use 1/4" stainless tubing, it's bigger and man is it stout! Dual gpu cards will be no problem. The only non-stainless is the aluminium L bracket supporting the rails. Also stainless +  aluminium is a good combination.

Thanks so much for reviving the thread, it's needed.

Some potential updates;

Hashplex

https://hashplex.com - domain lookup failure, most associated links fail or not updated for 2 years.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hashplex

Segmining

https://segmining.com - website is up, but thread discussion grew concerning 12/27/2017 and continuing till 09/22/2018.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=814296.msg26724682#msg26724682

Coingeeks.io

https://coingeeks.io/closed - Marked as closed since 09/01/2018

Sinohash

https://sinohash.com - Website no longer works, user reports of scam starting 08/09/2017

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1694162.msg20739592#msg20739592

The summer was a pretty hectic one. In addition to developing Cloudsmash, I also run a small datacenter called JeffColo.

In 2017, we decided to reorg and expand our datacenter into a larger space. We have had significant delays getting the new facility online. Before the move I suspected there would be problems, so in July I moved all the Oregon Cloudsmash gear down to Hurricane Electric in Fremont, CA.

The migration to Fremont was an excellent test for the resiliency of the mesh. Multiple peering points were dropped, vm's were migrated to alternate sites, hardware was packed up and driven to it's new home. Once back online, we established our new peering and began to migrate vm's back. It all worked perfectly, with zero customer downtime.

The move also allowed us to test using a virtualized equipment stack. This means that we have no physcial routers, firewalls, etc. Our servers connect to simple switches and rely on virtualized routers to establish upstream peering with HE.net. We received a 10 Gbps network drop, so we now get to validate networking performance beyond the gigabit threshold. Recently we have been able to get our virtual router instances to forward at the full 10 Gbps rate despite running on Westmere hardware from 2010.


The previous beta round quota had been filled and I've been accepting feedback for the last several months. There have been small improvements here and there, mainly surrounding network performance and reliability.

Recently we began the process for hiring an architecture engineer. The selection process has been going well and it looks like we may have our first Cloudsmash developer coming onboard soon. I expect to have another consumer beta round in late Spring 2018 and hopefully will do a very limited alpha round for providers in mid-Summer 2018.


I had not either and was frustrated that it didn't exist. It's certainly not vaporware, at this time it's a well tested stable platform that desperately needs a good web interface to interact with consumers and providers. Cloudsmash now has 14 pop's and several hypervisor locations, the network has experienced zero downtime since I brought it up in August 2016. It's kind of a living, breathing thing.

I know people have been patiently waiting for an update and I haven't given one in awhile. We have been expediting all of our engineering and plan reviews with a feverish pace. Unfortunately at the same time we also got an early present as Bitmain shipped a significant quantity of miners almost a month earlier than expected. Combined with the holiday season, the last 40 days have been a whirlwind.

Here is the update for everyone following this announcement.

We have 1 MW online at the moment that has validated our adapted modular design for indoor operation. Our electrical engineer has reworked the power distribution design in order to distribute the (48) 200 amp services throughout the building. Additionally we had to hire a civil engineer to work out all the new vault requirements for these new larger than life 1500 kVA transformers. All of this got submitted to local code enforcement for plan review, it passed and we received our permit to start work. Getting this all pulled together going into the holidays was no small feat. All of this information was submitted to the local utility and we are waiting for them to come back with a cost and scheduled installation date for the first transformer.

These modifications shouldn't have been that big of a deal. However we had a benefit with the outdoor version of our module. When considering code enforcement, the outdoor module was considered its own independent structure. Unfortunately when you bring all that power in under one roof there are huge changes that have to be made. I could get started on all the nuances, but it probably deserves it's own book.

Meanwhile we have contracted with a local excavation company that should be starting on the groundwork for the transformer pads and underground conduit maze. All that conduit is going to be quite the spectacle when it's all done and ready to back fill. The excavation company will have the horizontal boring work done to bring the 12 kV primary power to our new vaults.

At the same time we are having our boring work done for the electrical, we will also have boring done for our dark fiber feed into the regional internet exchange. Currently we are using symmetrical gigabit fiber from a local provider as our primary means of connectivity.

Our electrical supplier let us know that the switchgear should be delivered soon and our electrician is ready to go. We found a supplier who indicated they could have the 15,000ft of 300 MCM wire to us within 2 weeks.

While the electrical work is being done we will be having the building exterior modified to accommodate the air flow requirements for both incoming and outgoing air. A dedicated firewalled mechanical room will need to be built for power ingress.

tldr;

The good news is that things are progressing, the bad news is that we were way to optimistic about getting things done over the holidays. We are still at the mercy of the power utilities schedule, so at this time it's impossible to know precisely when things will actually be ready. However I believe all the things I described above should be done in 4-6 weeks from now and hopefully the utility will have us on their schedule for our first transformer install shortly after.

Also, we recently hired help for coordinating with customers. More importantly now than ever please use the 'hosting@jeffcolo.net' email address and you should get a far faster reply than you would from me.

As you can imagine, we are working hard every day to make this thing a reality.

We only have a point of presence in Manchester to relay our traffic into our network, hypervisors could be located anywhere.

However that does bring up an interesting point, I'll see if I can start maintaining a list of hypervisor locations.

Currently they are;

• Fremont, California USA
• Portland, Oregon USA
• Berkeley Springs, West Virginia USA
• Ashburn, Virginia USA
• Amsterdam, NL

Yeah, no website yet. What can I say? I'm a better packet wrangler than graphic designer. If anyone wants to help with a website I am open to suggestions. Currently this project is operated only by myself. I am actively looking to hire someone for help though, anyone interested?

Over the summer I did work on a web app for user interaction and it is mostly working. I just need to tie it into the backend and it should allow people to manage their virtual machines from the comfort of their web browsers. For now I handle all the administration (power on, power off, os install), however once the machine is running I'm basically hands off and the end user has full control of their environment.

Actually the core infrastructure all works and has been operating without downtime since August 2016. It's quite beyond the conceptual stage, the real question is scale, how many people and machines can I load up on my network topology before things start getting problematic.

The reason for the beta rounds is to slowly introduce additional people onto the platform to monitor and observe the network and any problems the beta applicant might run into.

There will be several beta rounds for virtual machine consumers and separate beta rounds for virtual machine providers. We are currently in our second round of beta applicants for consumers. If you are interested in getting a virtual machine please let me know by email at decentralizedvpscloud@gmail.com

Good news, the Chicago and Buffalo pop's are online and working. Thanks to Nexeon for providing the hosting for those.

In other news, the Hong Kong and Singapore providers are just awful. I've decided to shutdown those pop's for now, they have created far more problems than they have solved.

I wanted to update everyone following this announcement on the state of things at the moment.

First and foremost, we did take possession of our new datacenter space on 09/11/2017. We were able to quickly get the first 500 kW service up and running that first week and were busy moving customer gear into it. Starting in October we were able to add an additional service for the second 500 kW service. This was supposed to be the cadence we would continue following until the new year when we planned to have our entire 3 MW available for colocation customers.

Unfortunately there have been delays thrown into the plan by both the local utility and also with our electrical equipment suppliers. The problem with the utility stemmed around our stated load calculations and the utilities lack of belief in them. The utility here has never had to size equipment for a datacenter before and they undersized our service delivery transformers despite our indicated load figures. We were unaware of the sizing problem since the transformers have no significant information located on the exterior.

The first 500 kW service turned out to be running on a 300 kVA transformer which is being upgraded this Friday to a more suitable 500 kVA unit since it was determined that we are severely overloading it to the point of leaking oil.

The second 500 kW service in turn was also on a similar undersized transformer that doesn't seem to match their records. At this point we are unsure what size it actually is and have been instructed to halt adding any additional load until the size can be validated. We have been monitoring the temperature rise of that transformer and found it to be operating well within tolerances. Unfortunately the utility did not agree with our assessment and we will need to wait until Friday to find out what the situation is.

At this point the utility determined the existing plan for power distribution was no longer going to work as our "constant" load was not within their expectations. They wanted to revisit the plan to oversize our transformers and also potentially shorten our timeline to getting a significant amount of capacity online. They proposed that instead of using 6 x 500 kVA transformers as originally planned that instead they would site 3 x 1500 kVA transformers over the next 3 months and limit our usage to no more than 3.5 MW ensuring that we are only ever running the transformers at a maximum of 73% utilization.

That means that as soon as that first 1500 kVA transformer is placed, we would be bringing on an additional 1.15 MW immediately. That could certainly accelerate customer placement. Unfortunately this also means it all has to go back to the electrical and civil engineers to update the design, back to the county for a plan review of the changes and then finally onto the build out schedule at the utility. I have no idea how long this will take, we are trying to expedite it as much as possible.

Unfortunately shifting from 500 kVA to 1500 kVA transformers significantly increases the fault current requirements of down stream equipment. This resulted in some design changes to the type of disconnects and respective fuses. Fortunately it didn't change any of the customer facing switch gear (meters).

The unfortunate part is the update from our electrical supplier on the state of our order for that customer facing switchgear. Apparently due to the events in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, electrical equipment has become very high demand and disaster relief areas get first priority. We were given an estimate of approximately 6-8 weeks before we see any of that gear. I really hope it ends up being sooner, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I suspect that the utility changes and respective local government involvement will likely cause a similar delay. We're going to try to make enough progress with the utility so that by the time work begins it will be coordinated fairly closely with the arrival of our long awaited switchgear.

All this means that if you were given an availability date of late October to early November you can expect it now to be closer to late December to early January.

List has been updated!

Have you ever been a customer? Do you have some experience you would like to share? If you are referring to the delay on email response or pm's? You might have missed the notices I posted about what to expect here;

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1467198.msg22218765#msg22218765

and here;

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1467198.msg21330284#msg21330284

Sorry we couldn't meet your expectations. I hope you can elaborate more as to how you weren't satisfied.

We wouldn't have room for that based on our waiting list until most likely late December to early January. If you would like I can put you on the waiting list. What type of Antminer are they S9, L3+, D3?

I believe you were sent a PM, let me know if you still have questions.

As stated above, we are busy building out at this time. We will not be responding to hosting requests quickly.

With the current state of the waiting list we have no available capacity opening up until late December 2017 to early January 2018.

If you sent us an email asking for a capacity reservation then you will be added to the list in the chronological order we receive the emails. We do not update the list on this announcement page everyday, we will attempt to update it every couple of weeks.

Obviously customer equipment that is showing up now needs to be setup and running as quickly as possible so our buildout is of the most importance in priorities.

Hosting requests for capacity that isn't built out yet must take a lower priority. I know this might seem hard to understand, but if you are a customer who has had equipment showing up in the last two weeks then you probably value this order of priorities quite a bit.