So, yesterday I wandered aimlessly amongst the suburbs in the general vicinity of my home. In Sofia, there is many small commercial properties nestled at the base of residential towers, they are everywhere. Some of them are absolutely terrible locations for retail, and thus also the prices are very low, retail businesses churn a lot more money so they usually are more expensive, but when they are in a bad location it can be hard to turn a profit without enough foot traffic. This makes them ideal for a data center.
All images, if you download them, you can find the GPS coordinates also if you are interested.
This location is a former bakery. It has about 30 square metres up front, and of course space out the back with plumbing but mostly area that would have been used for bench space and ovens. This also means that it probably has quite a considerable capacity for a lot of power availability, since a small bakery like this is probably burning 5000W at minimum cooking up bread.
For computers this translates to enough for 50-100 GPU miners with dual video cards. I don't know how to contact the owners to offer them a rental contract, however, but it should not be hard to find them. Expanding power capacity is of course possible at any location but this is a good baseline.
This location is along the edge of a busy main road that passes near my house. About 1km closer to my house from this location is already the central office for SAP, which obviously must have terabits of connectivity running its networks. Looking at it, I guess there is about 50sqm of floor space available. Note that none of these that I am showing you have advertised a price, but I have generally picked locations which would be around 150-250 euros per month rent.
This is one of several I will show you that are located near the central shopping district of Krasno Selo. It has 45 square metres of floor space. It is more of a location for retail than offices, but again, the rent will be in the same general range, it is not in the retail district, where prices are higher.
This one is also in Krasno Selo, and looks like around 40 square metres as well. This one and all the previous lack substantial physical security, which would necessarily have to be added. However, security patrols can be hired and the location can be manned 24/7.
This location was probably at some point some kind of wholesale distributor or workshop. It has solid security already, and is even a little further off the main drag, and having looked a bit inside it, somewhere around 30-40 square metres of floor space.
This location is a former tiling supply. It is a little closer to the main shopping areas, specifically, Bulevard Bulgaria. It also has existing physical security, and the floor space is probably more like 50-60 square metres.
Telegram discussion group for SteemHostingBG
Invitation link to join the group can be found here
We have one small investor, plus myself so far, and invite others either who want to invest, or have a more direct role in the operation, whether business administration, liason (a native bulgarian speaker would be essential), systems administration and specialists in hosting and mining. I am a generalist and a quick study but I know that this requires specialists to be involved, as I am certainly not expert in business administration, bookkeeping, or marketing, but I have significant experience in systems administration and networking.
For others in other places with good connectivity and low operation costs:
Also, although this is primarily about setting up a shop here in Sofia, Bulgaria, I think it is a valid reason for joining the discussion if you have a location in which you can procure the necessaries for running a hosting operation elsewhere at similarly low prices. More is better, this is a distributed network, and nodes like SteemHostingBG is not intended to be a 'cloud' but rather a supernode of a distributed data and computation network.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
