Hello all,
Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. Recently I got curious with the pros and cons of mining using the cloud, and decided to test them out. I've seen a couple of guides here but they seem to focus on DigitalOcen and/or AWS. Neither of them are profitable if you look at their costs per hour. Anyway I just wanted to share the services I've tried, together with some screenshots so you can see for yourself if it's worth it. I'm mining MemoryCoin (MMC) and the miner may be specific to MMC, but you can use it to mine any coin really, as long as the CPU mining is not *that much* slower than GPU mining...
Below is a list of services I've tried (no hidden referral links
), as well as the corresponding miners I've used.
yamminer:
http://dl.mmcpool.com/yvg1900minerd/mmcminer:
http://mmcwiki.com/mmcminer_install_ubuntu_debian_mmcpoolAWSIf you can get some AWS credits, I'm currently running a c3.xlarge instance on-demand at $0.30 per hour, and a c3.large spot instance at $0.10 per hour. If you keep a lookout the spot instances can get really cheap sometimes (like $0.06 per hour for a c1.large, which is actually very powerful but I'm not using due to reasons I'll mention later).
The key thing to note is to make sure to use a HVM instance. I'm using this "Amazon Linux AMI (HVM) 2013.09.2 - ami-f8f297c8". For both the large and xlarge instances, I'm using yamminer generic. The reason for using a HVM instance is that so far I've only gotten yamminer to work with the HVM instance. Some stats and configuration:
c3.largemining-params = mmc:av=2&aesni=on&m=2048
MMC Agg. SPM: 2.005, HPM: 2.050; Rnds C/I: 9185/1851, Don. C/I: 98/23; Cfg/Wkr SPM: 2.010/1.0268, Cfg/Wkr HPM: 2.055/1.0276 9199 rnds AV=2, ART=58388
c3.xlargemining-params = mmc:av=1&aesni=on&m=4096
MMC Agg. SPM: 4.309, HPM: 4.414; Rnds C/I: 19997/3700, Don. C/I: 206/39; Cfg/Wkr SPM: 4.320/1.1053, Cfg/Wkr HPM: 4.428/1.1071 20035 rnds AV=1, ART=54196
As you can see, I get a decent combined 6.47 HPM with these 2 instances.
HP CloudHP gives a free trial for $100/month for 90 days (3 months), check
http://www.hpcloud.com/free-trial. This allows me to run a standard.medium instance for 90 days. For this, I chose Ubuntu 12.04.
Here are my settings on yamminer:
mining-params = mmc:av=1&aesni=on&m=2048
MMC Agg. SPM: 0.944, HPM: 0.991; Rnds C/I: 3323/1393, Don. C/I: 35/13; Cfg/Wkr SPM: 0.944/0.4960, Cfg/Wkr HPM: 0.991/0.4953 3358 rnds AV=1, ART=121144
As you can see, the HPM is 0.991, not too shabby.
AzureAzure also gives $200 of free trial for one month.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/I couldn't get yamminer to work with any of the instances, and in the end I settled for Extra Large (8 cores, 14 GB memory) running Ubuntu and used minerd, and am getting 0.924 hash/min. Again, not too shabby.
JoyentJoyent has a free trial too. I'm using High CPU 8 with Ubuntu 12.04.
Below are the stats:
mining-params = mmc:av=1&aesni=on&m=8192
MMC Agg. SPM: 0.369, HPM: 0.456; Rnds C/I: 146/2958, Don. C/I: 38/1017; Cfg/Wkr SPM: 0.369/0.0582, Cfg/Wkr HPM: 0.466/0.0582 184 rnds AV=1, ART=1031141
Pretty bad, huh?
With some tweaking, the new parameters:
mining-params = mmc:av=1&aesni=on&m=4096
MMC Agg. SPM: 5.123, HPM: 5.290; Rnds C/I: 38/0, Don. C/I: 19/4; Cfg/Wkr SPM: 5.123/1.2822, Cfg/Wkr HPM: 5.315/1.3288 57 rnds AV=1, ART=45153
Impressive HPM at 5.29 compared to the rest. Lesson learnt here, even though the system had 8GB, using 4GB resulted in much better performance. Always test and trial and error
.
Note: Joyent actually shut off and deleted my account. I had to email them to reinstate it, and they never offered a reason. I'm also quite sure there're some issues with their log in system, I am unable to log in twice now although I've changed my password and I've had to reset it each time.
Summary and ThoughtsI don't think mining in the cloud is profitable in the long run, unless you spot an alt that you think is worth investing in and see a huge growth going forward (then again, you can just purchase them directly). However, in the short term (and before you run out of email addresses, phone numbers and credits for whichever cloud provider you're using), and with a bit of effort, you can stand to gain quite a bit. Combined with my desktop mining MMC, I have a decent 14.40 HPM on average and have peaked at 20+ HPM once. Unfortunately I don't have a screencap of that, but you can see the one with 14.4HPM:
One thing to note is that you can technically go for the higher powered instances, but end up being able to use them for a shorter period of time as your credits will run out faster. Do take due diligence in calculating the costs of your credits
. Also, while I did the mining with MMC, this should technically work with any other coin and miners
. Do post if you have any questions and I'll try my best to help.
If this guide has been useful for you and you'd like to donate, here're my wallet addresses, thanks!:
MemoryCoin MMC: MGM8jcq6F8gN7vCt6eZaTBQA6PoeA94zke
Quark QRK: QitSWH9ZVZaadyVzRbLM1ZuKnJxrjgLKYA
LiteCoin LTC: LVtAdoLmgJgcZaqUXCHYQxnEqAZwbYCZeX
EarthCoin EAC: eRi2NVviQoDDFVunG7pGbQ2sYSWsLAcTJP
DigiByte DGB: DELB1n6z6R5JJdvwQLkqwqizsSDZYE4gGY
