What do you think about using AWS for Mining?

[rifiuti]

There is tools like EC2, S3, Redshift and etc.

Due high hourly price using AWS might not seem like the best option for mining but sometimes I prefer to use "Spot Instances" for mining. Which means, you can get machines for hourly rate at around 0.7 USD instead of 2,1-2,3 USD.(Based on the machine you use, price might change. I usually use g2.8xlarge)

I'm very curious to see, if there is any miner in this forum using AWS for mining?

I would to like hear your experiences on that. Downsides and upsides...

[leowonderful]

AWS was barely profitable years ago. AWS is very unreliable as you're using a CPU to mine, and that means barely any profit can be found there. Even with free AWS costs, you'll get hashrates of barely 1MH/S in most cases. You probably won't even be able to withdraw your earnings with that little hashpower, much less see the profit you've earned. I even doubt you'll find shares with that low hashrate. No, unless it's free you won't gain anything, and it's just a general waste of time. Just buy a physical miner if you want to mine at all, there's really no way around it in most cases.

[-ck]

If you're talking about mining bitcoin, running AWS instances costs a quadrillion times more than it earns in mining, and that's not an exaggeration.

[Shiroslullaby]

You can get some free AWS servers but the amount of storage and traffic you get is very low.
I'm not sure what the cost is once you go past the free tier but yeah its probably way higher than the amount you would mine,
and since its CPU mining it would have to be Etherium or some altcoin, right?

[ColderThanIce]

You can get some free AWS servers but the amount of storage and traffic you get is very low.
I'm not sure what the cost is once you go past the free tier but yeah its probably way higher than the amount you would mine,
and since its CPU mining it would have to be Etherium or some altcoin, right?

Storage and bandwidth (I think you mean bandwidth when you say traffic) aren't really important factors for mining. Modern mining programs are lightweight and can use very little bandwidth (especially if you set a very high share difficulty, but that probably isn't a good idea). Like -ck mentioned, it wouldn't make sense to mine straight bitcoin on a cloud instance. However, if you're able to get an instance for a third of the price and you're able to jump on a new CPU-only coin, there's a chance you'd be able to make some money. I remember some people used cloud instances a couple years ago to mine CPU-only coins as soon as they released, and some of them were able to make a bit of money. Keep in mind that they only used these cloud servers to mine for short periods of time (days or a couple weeks usually) because usually it costs more to pay for the server than you'd be able to earn from mining. Additionally, some VPS providers will shut servers down when they see that they're being used for mining, because of the huge drain on CPU resources that mining uses. I'm not sure what Amazon's policy on mining is, but that's something you should keep in mind.

[rifiuti]

Another question; If you would use AWS for mining, which machines you would prefer to use? Which one is more affordable but also powerful mining?

Assume that you have huge amount of AWS coupons for that.