Since Storj launched the Storj public storage network in 2018, it has grown to tens of thousands of storage providers across more than 100 countries who operate nodes on the network. This is made up primarily of individuals enabling their spare hard drive space to be accessible by Storj storage services.
Have excess storage hardware and good connectivity in your home or small business? Looking for a simple way to monetize your space capacity? Interested in joining the Storj public storage network but don’t know where to start?
In this article, we’ll provide insights on how the Storj public storage network works, requirements to join the network, and cover benefits of being part of a true globally distributed cloud storage network.
Storj public storage network defined.
Storj does not own or operate a single data center. Instead, Storj puts spare storage space to work on a global network. Simply defined, Storj operates a global storage network that anyone from individuals to commercial data centers can join to earn money from spare hard drive capacity.
How it works.
The network currently has tens of thousands of storage nodes in over 100 countries. Erasure coding is used to automatically split each object file into encrypted pieces that are stored across different nodes. Reconstruction of the file only requires only a small portion of the pieces. This method ensures extremely high security by default as well as 11 9’s of durability.
Storj uses intelligence to find nearby, quick nodes to retrieve files from. To provide excellent performance and dependable access to download big datasets from any location in the world, this is coupled with parallelism. The cost savings are much more pronounced when data replication and storage costs are eliminated across various areas for performance or durability. Integrating Storj is quick and simple because of its S3 interoperability and connections with top backup programs.
Who can supply capacity to Storj?
By becoming a storage provider who operates nodes on the network, you enable your unused hard drive space to be accessible by Storj storage services. Once your node is up and running you will be compensated in STORJ for any storage and bandwidth usage accessing your node.
Here are the prerequisites to join the network.
Recommended setup
- One processor core for each storage node process
- One hard drive, JBOD, per storage node process. NO SMR.
- 2 TB of available space per storage node process
- 1.5 TB per month of transit per TB of storage node capacity; unlimited preferred
- 3 Mbps upload bandwidth per TB of capacity
- 5 Mbps download bandwidth per TB of capacity
- Uptime (online and operational) of 99.5% per month
Minimum setup
- One processor core for each storage node process
- One hard drive, JBOD, per storage node process. NO SMR.
- 500 GB of available space per storage node process
- 1.5 TB per month of transit per TB of storage node capacity
- 1 Mbps upload bandwidth per TB of capacity
- 3 Mbps download bandwidth per TB of capacity
- Uptime (online and operational) of 99.3% per month, max total downtime of 5 hours monthly
See Understand Prerequisites for detailed information on system requirements, internet connection, power supply, and additional considerations.
Clear benefits to becoming a storage provider.
The top reason that people become storage providers on Storj is to get more value from their existing hardware investments. Spare capacity can create value, and be part of a more sustainable future with Storj. I’ll be covering the actual ROI in a future article.
The other top reasons that people become storage providers are to be a part of world changing technology. Visionaries early on saw some of the data privacy concerns and limitations of Web2 cloud architecture and wanted to be a part of creating a disruptive alternative with Web3 technology. Others want to be a part of reducing the carbon emissions created from data storage. By using spare capacity and using it as long as possible without fear of data loss, this avoids 83% of the carbon emissions produced with traditional cloud storage. With the rate of data growth at 23% year over year, this can make a big impact on our planet.
No matter which of these or a combination of all of them sounds appealing, now is a great time to join the network. Storj is growing rapidly, which means you can reap the value and become an important part of changing the future of the cloud.
Put your spare capacity to work with Storj. Get started today.
