Mining is dominated by ASICs right now. Home miners can still make a profit but it’s becoming ever more difficult. VPS Mining is still a possibility, but as you guessed it’s not as simple as that.
In this guide, we’ve examined VPS mining, and it’s profitability.
If you read recent articles about cryptocurrency mining you will find everywhere that it became very volatile. Mostly ASIC miners are dominating the mining scene and the prices keep dropping. With the low prices of cryptocurrencies and the still high cost of ASIC miners, everyone warns you not to invest in new mining hardware.
We knew that it is not profitable, but we investigated an alternative route to cryptocurrency mining, where you don’t need to own your hardware in order to mine. How much can we earn a month? What needs to change in order for this to generate an income? Follow us through the journey to find out.
Disclaimer: Right at the beginning, we want to point out, that we are writing this article for demonstrating purposes. We do not encourage anyone to mine cryptocurrencies, and to mine at the places where we ran our tests.
About Cryptocurrencies
Blockchain
The blockchain is a public, distributed ledger that records the transaction of coins. As the name suggests it is a chain of blocks, where all block consists the hash of the previous block, up to the genesis –or the first- block. All nodes on the network must have the whole or a fraction of the blockchain downloaded, and writing to the blockchain is only possible with the agreement of all nodes.
Transactions
Transactions consist of one or more inputs and outputs, the addresses and the amounts. These transactions are stored in the blocks that make up the blockchain.
Ownership
The coins are stored in the blockchain registered to bitcoin addresses. Each address has a private key, that is impossible to get from the address, but easy to get the address from the key. This way it is safe to tell others you address without compromising your coins. However, if you lost your private key you lose access to the coins stored on the address and you cannot gain it back. The biggest loss was in 2013 when a user lost 7500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million at the time.
Generating coins
New coins are rewarded every time that a new block is added to the blockchain. While you are miming you are acknowledging the ongoing transactions and are looking for the hash of the block that is about to be added to the blockchain. This requires an immense amount of computing power, so the node that discovers the hash acquires coins for its work. For example, the current reward for a new Bitcoin block is 12.5 Bitcoins.
Mining
There are a few different methods to mine various cryptocurrencies. First, you can use your own hardware, to mine for yourself. This way you get all of the coins every time you are successful in the hashing race. Of course, this way you have a much less chance to get the coins.
Another way is to join a mining pool and mine coins together. In a mining pool, all participants work together and divide the gains among each other. This way if you find new coins, you need to share it, but you get your part also from other user’s mined coins. Of course, the amount you get is proportional with your contribution. Pools often have a small transaction fee, so gather information before joining one.
Hardware
There are multiple types of hardware that you can mine cryptocurrencies on. There were USB devices with small computing power that you could mine Bitcoin on. These sticks are no longer in use due to the increasing difficulty of the mining.
The next thing is CPU mining or using your own processor to find the next hash. The CPU of a PC provides much faster mining than the USB devices and are still in use in a few cases today (mostly for coins that are only mineable by CPU).
After a while users started mining on the video cards of their PCs. The GPUs could execute these calculations much faster than the main processors of the computer. Usually using more than one in one rig these became the main standard for mining setups.
There was a short time when FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) offered a bit advantage over GPUs in performance and power efficiency.
However, the ASICs(Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) beat everything in all aspects. They were much faster since they were built only for the purpose of executing the same calculations over and over and nothing more. And while an ASIC is unbeatable in mining bitcoin it cannot be used for anything else and they are very hard to get.
Cryptocurrency Finances
The main purpose of mining cryptocurrencies is to make a profit. In a usual way, a miner would get his hardware, set it up and run it somewhere. This includes the initial cost of the hardware, the monthly cost of electricity and cooling and in cases the cost of storing all the hardware. You need to compensate all these costs with the mined coins.
The number of coins mined could not be directly calculated, because it is not guaranteed that you will get a coin after x computing done. The number of coins mined depends on your hashing power and the difficulty of the cryptocurrency that you are trying to mine.
The RoI time (Return on Investment) is depending on the initial investment, the monthly costs and the monthly income. By using a VPS or dedicated server you are eliminating the cost of the initial investment by paying more monthly.
With this in mind calculating if it is worth it is easy. Do you earn more monthly than you spend? Easy right? Well, it’s not that simple, because the difficulty of the coins are always changing and also the prices of the coins are wildly fluctuating.
The good thing is, that this is not a hardware built for one coin, so you can change on the run if you want to mine a different coin. You can also choose to think ahead and mine coins with low difficulty and hope that their price goes up. Sadly you can’t predict everything with 100% certainty, so it will always carry a risk.
Mining Without Purchasing Hardware
There are two main routes when you want to mine cryptocurrencies.
One solution is to rent hashing power for mining farms (mostly called cloud mining), and you get coins proportional to what computing power you rented. In this case, the operators set up and maintain everything for you, you only need to know how much you pay for the hashing power you want.
Of course, this case you need to pay some fees for the operators, and always investigate before committing, to avoid shady businesses.
The other way that we took a look upon, is when you rent out general purpose hardware (a VPS in our case) and set it up to mine cryptocurrencies for you. This way you need to know how to set it up, but you don’t need to pay an extra fee for the setup and maintenance of the mining side.
Both cases make you able to mine cryptocurrencies without the need to get your own hardware and provide it proper cooling, constant power, and network connection. In return, the monthly costs will be higher than just paying for electricity.
Our Coins
Mining Bitcoin is definitely out of the question, even Etherium is hard to get into nowadays. So we chose some altcoins (some bigger, some not as well known) to mine for this experiment.
Bytecoin
Bytecoin was released on March 2014, independently developed from Bitcoin or its forks. It used the CryptoNote technology with open source code and it is also a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency. It shares a lot of features of other cryptocurrencies but uses a different method.
The algorithm actively uses the AEWS command system for x86 microprocessors with a large amount of memory. This makes the mining less efficient on GPUs and ASICs. ASICs only appeared for Bytecoin this year. The current Bytecoin difficulty is 56,881,357,633 with a $0.000589 price.
Zcash
Zcash is a direct fork of Bitcoin, sharing a lot of attributes with its predecessor, but built to be more secure and private. The system is using cryptography for more enhanced privacy for the users. Transactions can be as transparent and similar to the Bitcoin transactions, however, there is an option for shielded transactions, which are completely private.
In June 2018 the Zcash community voted against ASIC immunity, so now it is possible to mine Zcash on ASICs. The current difficulty of Zcash is 44,533,712 and the current price of Zcash is $48.52.
Gridcoin
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency, that uses Proof-of-Research to reward users in the Gridcoin network. The participants need to solve scientific problems in order to receive the rewards. It is collaborating with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC platform to reward the users that are solving scientific problems. It is a clever attempt to ease the environmental energy impact of cryptocurrency mining by using the network to solve real scientific problems.
Gridcoin is a bit different because it is a reward system for Boinc. There are whitelisted projects you can work on, and each one requires different types of calculations. Some can be only done with CPU, some are only GPU and some are available for both CPU and GPU. Because of this, you could say it is kind of ASIC resistant.
ASICs are made to do one kind of instruction very fast and efficiently, and these projects are requiring a larger variety of instructions to complete. There are some projects that could be completed with ASICs, but the projects are changing from time-to-time so always keep track of them.
A few examples for the workable projects are SETI@home for searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, PrimeGrid is a project dedicated to very large prime numbers or DENIS@Home which works on cardiac electrophysiological simulations. To efficiently mine Gridcoin it is important to choose the right project to work on. The current Gridcoin price is $0.004318.
Monero
Monero was founded in 2014 and focuses primarily on fungibility, privacy, and decentralization. It uses a Proof of Work mechanism, and an obfuscated public ledger to ensure security. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, this is not a fork of Bitcoin. Monero is based on the CryptoNight algorithm. Monero is still going strong, mainly because it is still mineable with CPUs. The current price of Monero is $43.30.
uPlexa
uPlexa is a new cryptocurrency that just got recently added to the exchanges. It targets the fast-spreading IoT devices to use them for mining while they are idle. They wish to give an option to pay for your devices and your system maintenance costs with this solution. It seems like uPlexa uses a modified CryptoNight miner, so it could be also mined efficiently with a CPU. We chose this to show you a newly launched coin and what mining rates can you expect The current uPlexa prices is $0.00021212.
Our Mining Results
Upon choosing our servers, we decided to try 3 different configurations at 3 different providers. One smaller server with only CPU available, one dedicated server with a 10 core processor and lots of RAM, and one server with a medium CPU and a powerful GPU. And while we know that VPS servers usually don’t offer the possibility for graphics card acceleration, we wanted to show one of these for comparison sake. The mining was not done at the same time, but all the start and stop dates are in the article, so you can check the difficulty variety during the times.
DigitalOcean
We choose our first server at DigitalOcean and we picked their second CPU optimized droplet. This plan comes with two virtual cores, 4 GB of memory and 25 GB of SSD storage. These types of plans are equipped with faster processors, so are perfect for computing heavy workloads.
The plan is available for $40/month so it is not so expensive to try out if you are interested. The servers are loaded with Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 (16 cores @ 2.60GHz), and each of this plan have 2 cores dedicated to them.
Bytecoin
To mine Bytecoin we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
At DigitalOcean we started mining Bytecoin on 11 23, 2018 at 13:17. The mining finished at 12 01, 2018 10:25. This means 7,028 mining minutes with an average hash rate of 90-95. We mined into a pool using MinerGate, and during our mining time, we mined 0.6525744 Bytecoins. If you do the math (calculating with a 30 day month) it comes out that we get around 4.01112 coins each month.
If we calculate with the same Bytecoin income from here and the same cost for renting the server, it will be profitable to mine if the price goes up to at least $9.972.
Gridcoin
There are currently two mining pools available for Gridcoin, GRCPool and Arikado Pool. We choose GRCPool for our test. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server was set up with Ubuntu 18, all drivers and software to their latest version. The only software to mine Gridcoin is BOINC. We had version 7.2.42 installed as it is the latest stable version for Linux distributions.
Our second coin at DigitalOcean was Gridcoin. We mined using GRCpool, that is the support platform for BOINC. Our mining ran from 12 07, 2018 13:12 until 12 15, 2018 10:00. We got 11,328 minutes invested in mining with an average hash rate of 87, and we got up to 0.433 GRC each day.
GRCPool calculations
Earning coins is not that conventional if you are mining Gridcoin. The amount that you earn each day is depending on your work that you are doing at the moment, the work that you have done in the past month, the computational power of everyone working on the current project, and the amount of work all users contributed to all projects. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but if you pay attention, you can get to the bottom of it.
We found a great guide on the topic of predicting your maximum payout if you are mining 24/7. The basic idea is that after your first day you reach about 10% of your maximum RAC (proportional with your daily payouts), 50% after 7 days, 75% after 14 days, 88% after 21 days, 94% of your theoretical maximum after 28 days and 97% just after 35 days.
Note that this is heavily volatile and depending on a lot of factors, so all we could do is take an educated guess with a short time spent on some of these projects.
With all of the above in mind, we could expect approximately 25.98 Gridcoin each month.
If we calculate with the same Gridcoin income from here and the same cost for renting the server, it will be profitable to mine if the price goes up to at least $1.539.
Zcash
To mine Zcash we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
Our third coin is Zcash. We mined starting 12 01, 2018 10:29 and stopped at 12 07, 2018 08:50, so we spent 8,541 minutes mining. Our mining rate fluctuated between 5.4 and 7.2 Sol/S. During this time we mined 0 coins, which is not surprising since it is mainly mined with ASICs these days. We made over 51,000 good shares during our time when we mined, we would probably get a small amount if we would mine for a longer duration, but it can be easily seen that it will not be profitable in any way.
Monero
For Monero, we choose Nanopool, with XMRig as our software. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server had Ubuntu 18 and version 2.8.1 of XMRig installed.
For our fourth cryptocurrency, we chose Monero. For Monero we mined from a Nanopool. Monero mining started on 12 15, 2018 11:55 and we finished on 12 19, 2018 09:12. With our 5,597 minutes spent mining and an average of 81.6 H/s, we received 0,0020436 coins. If we take 30 days as a month we could get 0,015773 coins each month.
With the same Monero income, it gets profitable if the price will rise to $2535.920.
uPlexa
For mining uPlexa we choose PoolBUX as our pool, and we ran XMRig-UPX to actually mine our coins. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
We installed Ubuntu 18 on our server with the latest drivers and software. We installed the 0.0.2 version of XMRig-UPX for our mining.
Our final coin was the freshly started uPlexa. We used PoolBUX as our mining pool. We started on 12 19, 2018 09 50 and stopped on 12 21, 2018 09:27. This gives us 2,857 mining minutes, during which we achieved an average 601 H/s. In this time we received 1,258.25 coins, so that takes us about 19,025.69 coins each month.
We caught the early phase of a coin to mine, so you can not really expect the same rates, but if we get this many coins it will be profitable if the price is $0.0021.
Contabo
At Contabo we picked one of their strongest dedicated servers, to show some numbers from the high-end CPU range. If you are looking for a dedicated server for any purposes check Contabo, they have really competitive prices. Our configuration came with a single Xeon E5 2630v4 (10 core @ 2.20 GHz), 256 GB ECC memory and 2 TB of HDD storage. Their monthly fee is 119.99€ and there is a one-time setup fee of 79.99€.
Bytecoin
To mine Bytecoin, we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
At Contabo we started mining Bytecoin on 12 03, 2018 at 10:41. The mining finished at 12 07, 2018 09:53. This means 5,712 mining minutes with an average hash rate of 340. We mined into a pool using MinerGate, and during our mining time, we mined 2.15527975 Bytecoins. If you do the math (calculating with a 30 day month) it comes out that we get around 16.30044 coins each month.
Calculating with the same coins received each month we can make a profit if the price goes up to $8.405.
Gridcoin
There are currently two mining pools available for Gridcoin, GRCPool and Arikado Pool. We choose GRCPool for our test. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server was set up with Ubuntu 18, all drivers and software to their latest version. The only software to mine Gridcoin is BOINC. We had version 7.2.42 installed as it is the latest stable version for Linux distributions.
Our second coin at Contabo was Gridcoin. We mined using GRCpool, that is the support platform for BOINC. Our mining ran from 11 28, 2018 13:05 until 12 03, 2018 10:21. We got 7,036 minutes invested in mining with an average hash rate of 338, and we got up to 0.978 GRC each day.
GRCPool calculations
Earning coins is not that conventional if you are mining Gridcoin. The amount that you earn each day is depending on your work that you are doing at the moment, the work that you have done in the past month, the computational power of everyone working on the current project, and the amount of work all users contributed to all projects. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but if you pay attention, you can get to the bottom of it.
We found a great guide on the topic of predicting your maximum payout if you are mining 24/7. The basic idea is that after your first day you reach about 10% of your maximum RAC (proportional with your daily payouts), 50% after 7 days, 75% after 14 days, 88% after 21 days, 94% of your theoretical maximum after 28 days and 97% just after 35 days.
Note that this is heavily volatile and depending on a lot of factors, so all we could do is take an educated guess with a short time spent on some of these projects.
With this in mind, we could expect approximately 83,83 Gridcoin each month.
With the same Gridcoin earned each month, it will be profitable if the price Gridcoin is $1.631.
Zcash
To mine Zcash we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
Our third coin is Zcash. We mined starting 12 07 08:54 and stopped at 12 15, 2018 10:00, so we spent 11,586 minutes mining. Our mining rate fluctuated between 38 and 69 Sol/S. During this time we mined 0 coins, which is not surprising since it is mainly mined with ASICs these days. We made over 70,000 good shares during our time when we mined, we would probably get a small amount if we would mine for a longer duration, but it can be easily seen that it will not be profitable in any way.
Monero
For Monero, we choose Nanopool, with XMRig as our software. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server had Ubuntu 18 and version 2.8.1 of XMRig installed.
For our fourth cryptocurrency, we chose Monero. For Monero we mined from a Nanopool. Monero mining started on 12 15, 2018 11:50 and we finished on 12 19, 2018 09:11. With our 5,601 minutes spent mining and an average of 303.3 H/s we received 0.00925502 coins. If we take 30 days as a month we could get 0.071383 coins each month.
If we calculate with the same coins received each month we can make a profit if the Monero price goes up to $1,919.221.
uPlexa
For mining uPlexa we choose PoolBUX as our pool, and we ran XMRig-UPX to actually mine our coins. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
We installed Ubuntu 18 on our server with the latest drivers and software. We installed the 0.0.2 version of XMRig-UPX for our mining.
Our final coin was the freshly started uPlexa. We used PoolBUX as our mining pool. We started on 12 19, 2018 09:48 and stopped on 12 21, 2018 09:26. This gives us 2,858 mining minutes, during which we achieved an average 898 H/s. In this time we received 2,166.04 coins, so that takes us about 32,740.7 coins each month.
We caught the early phase of a coin to mine, so you can not really expect the same rates, but if we get this many coins it will be profitable if the price is $ 0.0042.
AWS
At Amazon Web Services, we choose one of the starter Accelerated Computing plans. Our final choice was the EC2 – p2.xlarge plan that is loaded with 4 virtual cores (@2.3 GHz base or 2.7 GHz turbo) of Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4, 61 GB of memory and one NVIDIA Tesla K80 graphics card with 2496 processing cores and 12 GB of graphics memory. Note that the K80 is a dual GPU design, you will get half of one dedicated to your server.
While the Tesla K80 is a great and powerful graphics card we found it hard to get it to work with some of the mining software that we used. More detail on that at the specific coin that we are looking at.
This configuration costs $0.9/hour if you are paying for the on-demand version. In this case, you will pay $648 each month, but you can find cheaper options if you sign for a longer period and you pay ahead. If you pick the standard one year term all pay all upfront you will pay $0.573 for each hour, in case of a standard 3-year term you will pay $0.479 for an hour.
Bytecoin
To mine Bytecoin, we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
The miner used the GPU nicely, but the hash rates were not convincing. Using half of a Tesla K80 for only an extra ~250 H/s is not worth it. However, the setup was easy and the miner worked nicely.
At AWS we started mining Bytecoin on 01 22, 2019 at 11:30. The mining finished at 01 23, 2019 11:34. This means 1,444 mining minutes with an average CPU hash rate of 140 and the GPU providing 244-260 H/s. We mined into a pool using MinerGate, and during our mining time, we mined 0.71060955 Bytecoins. If you do the math (calculating with a 30 day month) it comes out that we get around 21,25923307 coins each month.
For this configuration to be profitable the price of Bytecoin should go up to $30.4808.
Gridcoin
There are currently two mining pools available for Gridcoin, GRCPool and Arikado Pool. We choose GRCPool for our test. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server was set up with Ubuntu 18, all drivers and software to their latest version. The only software to mine Gridcoin is BOINC. We had version 7.2.42 installed as it is the latest stable version for Linux distributions.
Our second coin at AWS was Gridcoin. We mined using GRCpool, that is the support platform for BOINC. The chosen project was Asteroids@home. Our mining ran from 01 22, 2019 10:59 until 01 24, 2019 11:02. We got 1,143 minutes invested in mining, and we got up to 0.286 GRC each day.
GRCPool calculations
Earning coins is not that conventional if you are mining Gridcoin. The amount that you earn each day is depending on your work that you are doing at the moment, the work that you have done in the past month, the computational power of everyone working on the current project, and the amount of work all users contributed to all projects. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but if you pay attention, you can get to the bottom of it.
We found a great guide on the topic of predicting your maximum payout if you are mining 24/7. The basic idea is that after your first day you reach about 10% of your maximum RAC (proportional with your daily payouts), 50% after 7 days, 75% after 14 days, 88% after 21 days, 94% of your theoretical maximum after 28 days and 97% just after 35 days.
Note that this is heavily volatile and depending on a lot of factors, so all we could do is take an educated guess with a short time spent on some of these projects.
With this in mind, we could expect approximately 85.8 Gridcoin each month.
The setup was easy and the miner worked without any issue.
For us to make a profit on mining GRC the price should be at least $7.552.
Zcash
To mine Zcash we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
On our server, we had Ubuntu 18 installed with the latest software and drivers. Our mining software was the MinerGate CLI miner v8.2. We would have used their most recent xFast miner, but there was no working Ubuntu build available.
Our third coin is Zcash. We mined starting 01 22, 2019 14:30 and stopped at 01 23, 2019 14:39, so we spent 1,449 minutes mining. Sadly we found out that the Equihash algorithm is not supported on the Tesla K80, so we could only use our processor for the task. This is quite disappointing, we were really curious about the power of a Tesla K80 mining Zcash. With 4 cores of our Xeon-E5 2686, we only had an average of 6.5 Sol/s.
During this time we mined 0 coins, which is not surprising since it is mainly mined with ASICs these days. We made over 78,000 good shares during our time when we mined, we would probably get a small amount if we would mine for a longer duration, but it can be easily seen that it will not be profitable in any way.
Monero
For Monero we choose Nanopool, with XMRig as our software. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our server had Ubuntu 18 and version 2.10.0 of XMRig-Nvidia installed, with the latest CUDA Toolkit 10.0 set up.
Installing and setting up the mining software was relatively easy and without issues. It used the available CPU and GPU computational power nicely, but we still only had 163 H/s on average. And while Monero is resistant to ASIC mining, GPU mining should be still the best way to mine. We don’t know why was there this big difference in hashing rates.
For Monero we mined from a Nanopool. Monero mining started on 01 23, 2019 15:19 and we finished on 01 24, 2019 15:30. With our 1,451 minutes spent mining and an average of 163 H/s we received 0.00072874 coins. If we take 30 days as a month we could get 0.021696463 coins each month.
If the price of Monero goes up to $29866.619 it can be profitable to mine on this server.
uPlexa
For mining uPlexa we choose PoolBUX as our pool, and we ran XMRig-UPX to actually mine our coins. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
We installed Ubuntu 18 on our server with the latest drivers and software. We installed the 0.0.2 version of XMRig-UPX for our mining. There is a miner with GPU mining support (FruityMiner) but it was not working for us on our server. This is a new altcoin, so limited mining software availability is an issue.
Our final coin was the freshly started uPlexa. We used PoolBUX as our mining pool. We started on 01 23, 2019 12:06 and stopped on 01 24, 2019 12:20. This gives us 1,454 mining minutes, during which we achieved an average 674 H/s. In this time we received 260.43 coins, so that takes us about 7,737.672627 coins each month.
We can be profitable mining uPlexa if the price rises above $0.0837.
Comparisons
Let’s look through the numbers real quick, to see how our servers did in mining different cryptocurrencies. We made our calculations with the price of the coins on 01 29, 2019. The calculated income is in USD.
The prices were the following: Bytecoin: $0.000589, Gridcoin: $0.004318, Zcash: $48.52, Monero: $43.30, uPlexa: $0.00021212.
DigitalOcean
As we can see on the first graph, we got a really different amount of coins from the same VPS. All of these numbers are calculated, this much would we earn if we mined for a whole month. Of course, the two big factors for the amount we get each month is the difficulty of the current cryptocurrency and the computing power that we spend mining.
The more interesting graph is the income that we can generate while mining these coins. While Monero had very little coin generated, but the higher price gets us the second biggest income. Surprisingly the most profitable (or least amount of loss produced) was the new coin: uPlexa.
This cannot be sustainable indefinitely, but if you mine promising new coins that later rise in price, you can make a nice profit out of it. Even the new coin uPlexa only generated about 1/10 of the price of the VPS.
Sadly either of the coins generated enough income to worth it. This is most likely due to the current low price of all cryptocurrencies and the ASIC mining, that took over almost every altcoin.
Contabo
As we can see on the first graph, we got a different amount of coins from the same VPS. All of these numbers are calculated, this is the amount that we would get if we mined for a whole month. Of course, the two big factors for the amount we get each month is the difficulty of the current cryptocurrency and the computing power that we spend mining.
Our income at Contabo was showing the same trend as our mining at DigitalOcean. We get more income since the server is more powerful, but still not nearly enough to cover our expenses. The case is the same here, low altcoin prices and ASIC dominated mining.
Amazon Web Services
With the graphics accelerated VPS of AWS we can see some differences in the mined coins. With Bytecoin and Gridcoin we got nearly the same amount as we did in our Contabo mining. Sadly the Zcash and Monero miners could not utilize the included graphics card. (Either software problems or not supported graphics card)
At uPlexa we did not find a proper mining software that could work with our graphics card. We could use our CPU, but we see a lower amount of coins mined during our time. This is most likely due to more people mining the coin, so the difficulty has risen since our first mining.
Mining at AWS didn’t bring much different results as our other two VPS. The trend is the same, with uPlexa in the first place and Monero on the second.
However, with the increased cost of our server, we can not even hope for this to become profitable in the foreseeable future. This doesn’t mean that the Amazon servers pricing is bad, jut setting up these high-end servers for 24/7 operation without interruption obviously raises the expenses.
Conclusion
We can clearly see that mining on these servers is not profitable at all. We got the best results on a very new coin, but obviously, that is not sustainable long term. It is obvious that at the moment all cryptocurrencies are at a very low price. This could change in the future, but we can’t predict anything for certain.
We should note that the main purpose of these servers (or any other VPS) is that they are working and available all the time without interruption. That is why they are used for hosting websites on, so the users can access it any time they need.
This was a very interesting investigation/study to do for us. And while we did not find anything that is profitable, you can always mine an altcoin and hope that the price will go up, so it will be worth for you. In this case, mining now when the prices are low makes the most sense. It is more likely that if the price is low, fewer users will mine and the difficulty will drop, so you can mine more coins with the same amount of work done.
