I think uptime matters more than pool fees for large mining farms

[hashradar]

I’ve been looking at different Bitcoin mining pools recently and something caught my attention.

Whenever miners compare pools, the discussion almost always ends up being about fees. People spend a lot of time arguing over the difference between 0.5%, 1% or 2%, but I rarely see anyone talking about uptime, rejected shares or stratum stability.

Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, but if you’re running something like 10 PH/s, wouldn’t a few hours of downtime cost more than the fee difference between most pools?

For those running larger farms, what would make you leave your current pool first: higher fees or reliability issues? 

I’d be interested to hear some real-world experiences because sometimes it feels like miners spend more time comparing fee percentages than comparing the things that can actually stop a farm from earning. 

[NotFuzzyWarm]

For any decent pool, downtime is not an issue. Most have multiple nodes around the globe so just set the miners to automatically fail over to one of them if a node goes down. I use Kanopool and since it started in 2014 it has had ZERO downtime. Very rarely one of its nearly dozen nodes around the globe might have an issue but Kano very quickly resolves the problem and in the meantime my miners just switch to a different node until my main one is back online.

I should add that if you have a few hundred PH or more (no rentals) at no cost to you Kano will setup a local private node connected to the main servers for you. Rented hash is only allowed on the Solo side of the pool.

As others have said, uptime of the miners themselves is by far the main issue faced by both home and large industrial miners.

[FP91G]

I’ve been looking at different Bitcoin mining pools recently and something caught my attention.

Whenever miners compare pools, the discussion almost always ends up being about fees. People spend a lot of time arguing over the difference between 0.5%, 1% or 2%, but I rarely see anyone talking about uptime, rejected shares or stratum stability.

Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, but if you’re running something like 10 PH/s, wouldn’t a few hours of downtime cost more than the fee difference between most pools?

For those running larger farms, what would make you leave your current pool first: higher fees or reliability issues? 

I’d be interested to hear some real-world experiences because sometimes it feels like miners spend more time comparing fee percentages than comparing the things that can actually stop a farm from earning. 

Some large miners make their own pools and do not care about commission problems.
Other miners get involved with such pools and also receive favorable commission conditions.
A large miner has a lower commission, a lower price for electricity, a good discount on ASICs with favorable installment plans.