Hosting or your own site: what the choice really costs

Every buyer of more than a handful of machines faces this once: put them in someone else's building at an agreed price per kilowatt hour, or build and run a site yourself. Both are legitimate. The mistake is comparing a hosting rate against your own raw power price, because those two numbers are not measuring the same thing.

What a hosting rate actually buys

It buys power, but it also buys the building, the electrical infrastructure, the cooling, the network, security, hands on site and someone whose job it is to answer at three in the morning. Against a site you build yourself, the honest comparison is the hosting rate against your power price plus the amortised cost of all of that, plus your own time.

For a first deployment, or for anyone whose expertise is capital rather than infrastructure, hosting usually wins that comparison outright. It converts a construction project with a twelve month timeline into a contract.

What hosting costs beyond the rate

• Control over uptime. Curtailment decisions, maintenance windows and repair priority belong to the host. Read what the contract actually promises rather than what the sales conversation implied.
• Control over the machines. Firmware, tuning and pool configuration are sometimes yours, sometimes not. This has real revenue consequences.
• Counterparty risk. Your hardware sits in a building you do not own, under a company whose balance sheet you cannot see. Ask what happens to your machines if the host stops paying its own power bill.
• Exit friction. Moving a fleet out is a logistics project. Know the notice period and who pays for removing the machines before you sign, not after the relationship sours.

When your own site wins

The comparison flips when you bring something to the table that a host cannot price. Usually that is energy: power you already control, at a cost no third party will match, or on terms nobody will host you on. It can also be scale, or a strategy that depends on making your own operating decisions.

• You already have power, land or a building, especially stranded, curtailable or behind the meter energy that nobody will host you on at that price.
• You are large enough that the infrastructure amortises across enough machines to beat a hosting margin.
• Control matters to your strategy: your own curtailment logic, your own firmware, your own maintenance priorities.
• You intend to run for many years. Building is a capital decision that pays back slowly and then keeps paying.

Questions worth asking a host before signing

Hosting contracts differ more than hosting sales pitches do. These five questions separate the operators who have thought about failure from the ones who have not, and the answers belong in the contract rather than in an email.

• Does the rate include everything, and what exactly can change it? Energy clauses that pass costs through can move a quoted rate a long way.
• What uptime is contractually promised, measured how, and what happens when it is missed?
• Who decides curtailment, on what trigger, and are you compensated?
• What is the repair turnaround, who supplies spares, and who pays for them?
• Can you visit, and can you see your own machines' data directly rather than through a summary?