I just ran some tests on some VPS services at Linode, Vultr and Digital Ocean. Running 4 CPU servers at each and running Tromp’s solvers on rc2 using the 4 CPUs package at each I got the following: Vultr: 3.83 Sol/s, Linode: 3.14 Sol/s, Digital Ocean: 3.17 (each completed a minimum of 10,000 Equihash solver runs).
These servers cost $40, $40 and $80 a month respectively. Taking the best case of Vultr $40 a month for 3.83 Sol/s that’s 0.1925 BTC per year for 1 H/s whereas cloud mining is currently cheaper (e.g. Zeropond at 0.156 BTC and GM cheaper at 0.0742 BTC albeit sold out). There will be optimizations to the miner but I imagine that will apply to both the native miner as well as the cloud offerings so long story short if you are thinking of mining on one of these cheap VPS providers it is likely not worth it (I believe it also may violate their T&C for excessive CPU use).
It beats a GPU if you can grab a whole setup for less than $100 on craigslist… And, as far as I’m concerned GPU mining is a myth at the moment. The hashrate of the testnet is only 500. If they have the capability, let’s see it spike into the tens of thousands for a few minutes.
At these numbers, the extra work required to run 100s of nodes, and the obvious risk of getting shut down by the provider I still think that GPU mining/cloud mining has the advantage.
Yup exactly that was my conclusion i.e. VPS vs. cloud mining then cloud mining is the likely winner (you do have a longer commitment with them though).
The comparison to home mining is difficult as everyone has a different cost of hardware, electricity and level of expertise which is why I specifically compared VPS solutions.
