So, a while ago I wanted to mine Ethereum, and I wanted to mine it FAST.
At the time, I was not too fussed about spending a couple of dollars to get a mining rig up and running, but I did not have the capacity to do it using my laptop (it just didn't have powerful enough GPU) so I started to look into some cloud mining options.
I quickly stumbled onto cloud mining using AWS - you see, the cool thing about AWS is that I don't have to worry about any hardware, keeping it cool, upgrading, storage bla bla the whole thing, all I need to do is spin up some of my instances, and voila! I am mining.
I followed this tutorial, I hope you guys find it helpful:
https://github.com/angelomilan/ethereum-guides/blob/master/GPU-cloud_mining.md
I got about 25/MHs and was costing me about $25/day, it wasn't exactly profitable at the time. But the cool thing was/is, is if ETH skyrockets to $100 overnight, I could spin up as many instances as I want, and I would assume that would be very profitable. So, it is all just sitting there, ready to go.
Here is a mining calculator, so you can work out how much you would earn with a specific hashrate.
https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator
If you have any questions, let me know below. also I would be happy to set these cloud rigs up for people, contact me if you are interested and we can work out a price for setup so you can have your own on tap 24/7 cloud mining rig.
I think if you changed to AWS spot pricing, you could make this profitable with a price rise in ETH. AWS spot pricing allows you to spin up instances at a much lower rate (sometiemes 70% lower) than normal $ market rates, but at the cost of uptime -if your offer falls below market rates, your instance is stopped - something I was not happy with when trying to mine.
One thing I did change from the guide was instead of having to start each GPU separately, on different screens, start them all at once on one screen via: ethminer --farm-recheck 400 -G -F http://127.0.0.1:8545 (as per https://gist.github.com/jmiehau/0470ef3262d83987221e)
That way you can definitely confirm all GPU are running via the output:
ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer0 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5… #aec7cfe5…
ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer1 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5… #aec7cfe5…
ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer2 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5… #aec7cfe5…
ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer3 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5… #aec7cfe5…
Happy mining!
