"Yelp" for Bitcoin miner hosting businesses

[2140labs]

I built a listing & review service for Bitcoin miner hosting companies in North America.

Check it out here - https://hashbranch.com

Right now, it's really difficult to find and compare all of the options for hosting your bitcoin miners. Most customers found their host through word of mouth, or through some random posts. This is not ideal. It's too confusing and frankly a little sketchy sometimes.

The goal is to provide a better selection and user experience for people that want to purchase miner hosting. A secondary effect is that this should make it cleaner for miner hosting business to get high quality leads for their services.

What is it exactly?

It is a searchable list of North American miner hosting businesses that highlights the important details of their offering.

It shows things like:

• Customer reviews
• Minimum order quantity & minimum contract length
• Power rates
• Facility location
• Hosting options
• Fee structure
• Security information
• Cooling strategy

If you are a host, or you know of one we're missing on here, please let us know so we can get them listed.

Thanks! Any feedback on this approach is welcome.

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[NotATether]

Nice job.

You should add a feature to let the mining host rep respond to each review, so they have a chance to address any problems with the service.

[mikeywith]

Nice job.

You should add a feature to let the mining host rep respond to each review, so they have a chance to address any problems with the service.

I honestly think his website is scammy at best, NONE of the hosts he lists are known, and their names are pretty strange, furthermore, all of the reviews on various services are 5 starts lol, some of them claim to have 1mw worth of power which can hardly host anything, while others claim to have close to 100MW which isn't easy to hide and should appear on a dozen search results but they are nowhere to be found!

What's even worse is that some of the companies claim to be founded in 2011.

[danieleither]

Nice job.

You should add a feature to let the mining host rep respond to each review, so they have a chance to address any problems with the service.

I honestly think his website is scammy at best, NONE of the hosts he lists are known, and their names are pretty strange, furthermore, all of the reviews on various services are 5 starts lol, some of them claim to have 1mw worth of power which can hardly host anything, while others claim to have close to 100MW which isn't easy to hide and should appear on a dozen search results but they are nowhere to be found!

What's even worse is that some of the companies claim to be founded in 2011.

You've never heard of HM Tech LLC? 

[mikeywith]

You've never heard of HM Tech LLC? 

I did, i even listed them as a trusted repair site in the pinned topic, not sure how I missed it, maybe it was not there when I checked! But still it does not take away from the fact that the website looks scammy to me.

[SFR10]

I built a listing & review service for Bitcoin miner hosting companies in North America.
~Snipped~
Any feedback on this approach is welcome.

I like the idea, but not its execution! I just did a test review on "this provider ^{[please remove it]}" and nothing stopped it from appearing right away on their page ^{[until there's a proper verification system in place (easier said than done), everyone should take all of those reviews with a grain of salt]}.

[stompix]

I did, i even listed them as a trusted repair site in the pinned topic, not sure how I missed it, maybe it was not there when I checked! But still it does not take away from the fact that the website looks scammy to me.

I have a really bad feeling about it, I just checked the top listing,
https://app.hashbranch.com/companies/05106f96-4b0e-4164-b9fc-51f2cd4f239a
I don't know anything about this one but, on the about us page,

Digital Bridge Mining (“DBM”) is a digital asset mining hosting provider (new gen bitcoin miners, L7’s, other). We offer a 5-star rated mining colocation solution for miners looking for a reliable and affordable hosting service. DBM believes to its core in the bitcoin network and what bitcoin can do for the future of humanity.

Do they have a link back to the reviews website? hmmm, what a coincidence!
A company with no real name, no physical address, no telephone number, no video no picture of their hosting "facilities" is on top of the list?

The second one with 8 years of experience and a one year old domain....
7 reviews, 3 on the 9/6/2022, 3 on the 9/5/2022, not fishy at all.

[examplens]

Do they have a link back to the reviews website? hmmm, what a coincidence!
A company with no real name, no physical address, no telephone number, no video no picture of their hosting "facilities" is on top of the list?

The second one with 8 years of experience and a one year old domain....
7 reviews, 3 on the 9/6/2022, 3 on the 9/5/2022, not fishy at all.

On OP's page, there is no website link in the review of Banta Business. Also, I can't find anything about them in a short search through Google. in addition, they have 5 (five stars) reviews. quite implausible.

Unless the OP is directly connected to all these websites, a scam motive would be strange because there are no affiliate links. The couple of listed services that I checked do not even offer such an option. Affiliate commission is the most common reason why we have a bunch of promotions of scam cloud mining services.
so at first glance, it doesn't seem that the OP has an interest in promoting these services.

[mikeywith]

Unless the OP is directly connected to all these websites, a scam motive would be strange because there are no affiliate links.

Not really, OP, or anyone for that matter can just list 5 fake host services that he "owns", and cover them with another 5 legit companies, this way, every person who decides to buy into one of the services has 50% chance of being scammed, and judging by all the weird names and Info listed, it seems worse than just 50/50, more like 90/10.

Also, given the fact that most people are lazy, even the contact form for those legit companies could very well be redirected to an email address owned by the same person which makes things even worse.

I don't have solid proof that OP is trying to scam anyone, nor have I accused him of being a scammer, but that doesn't change the fact that I am convinced that this website is a scam at best, also "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

[2140labs]

Nice job.

You should add a feature to let the mining host rep respond to each review, so they have a chance to address any problems with the service.

Thank you! Yes the site is a work in progress, and contrary to the "Scam at best" claims from other users here, I'm a one man show trying to help bring some visibility to the fragmented miner hosting market. I have no ownership in ANY of these facilities, and am providing this service for free at the moment.

[2140labs]

OP here - I'll try to address all of these concerns in one response. Apologies as I don't log into bitcointalk very often so I'm actually happy to seem some discussion here!

I launched this site to try and help bring some visibility into the market as to what options are out there for miner hosting. The review system was a simple attempt at adding some more color to the offerings, by letting users of those services post reviews. Obviously these can be faked, but I've been working on implementing some better verification on the review side, although it'll never be perfect. You can't review the same listing twice, if it looks spammy I'll remove, and if you try and review your own listing (yes people try this) I'll remove it. This isn't perfect, but getting better.

I have 0 ownership relationship with any of these hosting companies, and I've actually met most of them over video calls / phone calls to get to know them more. Of the one's I've spoken to, they all seem like honest businesses trying to get their name out there and were quite receptive to having a platform to showcase their offerings. In fact the impetus for me building this was that I was trying to build out a hosting facility, and was getting nowhere in my state. I realized that it's no easy feat and wanted to build something to help the ecosystem grow in a healthy way.

As far as a business model goes, a handful of these listings have agreed to a referral commission IF someone finds them through this site. I don't adjust any ordering of search results, or even prioritize visibility of those who've agreed, and I've actually sent more referrals to hosting companies who aren't compensating me in any way (not great for business but what're you going to do!).

The long term goal is to build out a deeper level of verification of both the hosting companies themselves, and the customers reviewing services. This is all on the roadmap, but will take some time to build out and execute!

These businesses are at different levels of maturity, some don't even have websites. This listing has been helpful in taking some of the customer acquisition burden off of them, although it's not perfect.

I do really appreciate the feedback & criticism. It's very valuable to understand how this might appear to certain folks. Feedback can't all be positive!

Take care. I'm always happy to chat with anyone who wants to meet and learn more about the project.