I have bought my first miners with Zionodes on November 21st. Then I added some more on November 24th and 25th, December 5th and December 30th. Right now I have 14 x S19 95TH miners with Zionodes. So let’s have a look at how it is going with these miners.
Update on Zionodes Bitcoin mining hosting
I bought the miners on different dates, and slightly different prices. Here is a quick summary of my purchases. All of these are 95th S19 miners:
- November 21st – 1 miner – $9,116
- November 24th – 3 miners – $9,116 each
- November 25th – 4 miners – $9,434 each
- December 5th – 4 miners – $9,752 each
- December 30th – 2 miners – 9,752 each
In Q4 2021 the Bitcoin mining demand was booming and at most places the prices were significantly more than this. So I considered this a pretty solid deal. Especially with the electricity and hosting price of $0.066 per KW/h.
Zionodes Hosting Performance in Moldova
At this time, the only location Zionodes is offering hosting is in Moldova, country right next to Russia and Ukraine. With the current war in Ukraine going on, this is definitely something that worries me little bit. But let’s have a look at how the miners were performing so far.
Since with Zionodes you can remotely change the pool setting any time you want, I experimented little bit with these miners, and tried different pools. I had some miners on Slush Pool, some on ViaBTC and some on F2Pool. Here is performance of my miners on ViaBTC:
And here a similar chart for F2Pool:
As you can see I moved most of my hash-rate to F2Pool for now.
There are some downtimes occasionally. Some of them actually announced ahead of time as part of maintenance, some of them more unexpected and having to do with my specific miners going offline. Some downtime is expected, and it is just a part of a daily life of a someone like me using 3rd party hosting to mine BTC. So with that being said, so far the performance was really good, with very few downtimes.
Zionodes customer support and account management after 3 months
Where Zionodes really excels so far is customer support whenever your miner goes offline or down for some reason other than scheduled maintenance.
With other hosting providers like Compass or Wattum, if your miner goes down or needs a fix, you will lose all your hashpower during the time that it is being fixed. There is many stories on this on Reddit or on Discord channels.
Let’s check just few examples here. Compass mining discord user had his miner sent to Bitmain to have it fixed on February 12th. It was fixed and back hashing on March 7th and he had to pay $30 shipping:
Another Compass Mining user complaining that his miners go offline almost every week and he needs to fill in support requests on a regular basis.
All you need to do is search “Offline” in the Compass mining discord and you see plenty of similar examples. I personally have no experience with Compass yet. I hope to get some miners there soon, so I can write a review. I just want to point out that this is a common experience with different hosting service.
We don’t have to try hard to find similar issues with Wattum hosting. I was already describing one example in my follow up Wattum review. And there are more example of issues again on Discord. Wattum has their own discord now too, but it is nowhere near as active as the Compass mining discord. Still there are examples of customers with their miners going offline, like this Wattum customer sharing his hashrate chart:
So how does Zionodes differ from these stories? I would summarize it in 2 main points:
- Pro-activity
- Providing of replacement hashpower immediately
- By proactivity I mean that many times it is actually Zionodes customer support reaching out to me telling me that a miner is down or offline.
- And when that happens, they actually connect a replacement miner directly to my pool, to make up for the outage.
And here is the replacement hashrate on Slushpool:
So generally the support is still very responsive, even after 3 months of using Zionodes. Sometimes I wonder how big this company actually is? How many customers do they have? There is barely any mention about Zionodes online, at least not from actual customer perspective. In any case, so far so good here.
Zionodes Bitcoins mined
My mining efforts with Zionodes so far mined 0.57 BTC. As mentioned before, some of the miners I got in November, but most of them in December. The monthly cost to run these miners is only $155.
Here are the number until Feb 28th 2022:
- Miners costs: $132,712
- Electricity costs: $6,339
- BTC mined: 0.57
- BTC value now: $23,280
- ROI: around 17% so far
Summary
So far Zionodes has really exceeded the expectations I had of them. It all started last November when I risked $10k to buy a miner from a completely unknown company without any reliable reviews. It turned out to be the cheapest and most reliable hosting company out there for now.
I really hope Zionodes becomes more diversified in the future. I would like to purchase more miners there, but I am really hesitant to have all my miners in a country which is bordering with Russia and is not part of NATO. I think the risks are too much.
Other than that, I give Zionodes 100%.