so, the miners were received at Umisoo and are hashing now since a few days. My appreciation of the service is a bit mixed, here's why:
-Communication is a bit lacking. I was wondering when Umisoo would start operating the miners until I saw that I had an invoice for 0.366 BTC per unit which I had to pay before the miners were put under my control. It would be better if they sent an email for this, to avoid the situation I had when I finally could change the pooldata on the miners: until that moment, Umisoo were mining with the units at antpool and another pool (I forgot) with their own workers!
-Hashrate displayed at umisoo is heavily normalized: it usually shows this:
so a nice flat line.
However, hashrate at slushpool is displayed differently (these are 2 devices):
you can see average hashrate is below 4 TH/s. I had best results so far on slushpool, tried antpool (p2p), eligius and ghash.io, they had varying results but less good than sluhspool (I manually set minimal difficulty to 2048).
-Bitmain partnership: I wanted to buy more miners and host them at Umisoo, but Bitmaintech have removed the option to ship to Umisoo directly and told me no reason for this, simply if I wanted to host them there, I would have to send them to their address. Umisoo did not seem to know about this and told me a couple of days ago, they'd get back to me when they have more info. Still waiting for that. Hope they will respond before my coupons become invalid.
-Fees: as I said, about 4,50$ in BTC per day, in January there is supposed to be a reduction in electricity costs, but I am waiting for an official confirmation. The fees need to be paid beforehand and as far as I can see, I can send them BTC whenever I want in advance, so that might be handy to be able to time those payments so that you get the most out of your BTC (pay the fees when BTC is high). Still, there is a serious lack of information on that matter, I wish they sent at least an email to tell you how the system exactly works and also to inform you when the miner is going online (for me it was in the middle of the night, so I "lost" some mining time before I could set my pooldata.
-Pooldata: in their interface it is only possible to set pooldata and workers/passwords. No possibility to over/underclock, change parameters, reset or update firmware. I guess you need to send mail to support for these matters, but haven't tried yet.
On the whole, it's quite basic, but sufficient. You MUST remember though to select the pool parameters you want to submit (put a tick in the box next to it) before you send the data, or else the parameters will not be sent to the miner.
My conclusion: not too bad as a service so far, you receive a fairly good service with mails responsiveness (well, so far I haven't really stressed them), the service continuity has been OK for the short time I have been with them but hashrate is a little underperforming. I don't know if that's the pool or the units themselves, but the hashrate indication on Umisoo website is definitely not very accurate.
I would use them to host more miners, so far they have done well, but I wish I had direct access to the miner's built-in UI. Still, the basic functionality is there and you can change pools and workers to your heart's content.
I just wish I knew why Bitmaintech seem to have stopped collaborating with them, but I doubt Umisoo are going to tell me.
