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Sia (hostd)

Category: Storage | Status: Active

Website: https://sia.tech

Description

Sia is a decentralized storage marketplace run by the Sia Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, and it has operated since 2015. You run the Foundation's official hostd node to rent out spare disk space and earn Siacoin (SC) from storage and bandwidth contracts. hostd ships an official Docker image and a built-in web UI.

You must buy some Siacoin before the node earns anything. Hosts lock collateral against every contract and pay a small fee for each storage proof. The collateral comes back when a contract completes, and it is burned if the node goes offline or loses data. That makes Sia a fit for an always-on machine with a large spare disk, not a small VPS slice.

Earning Estimates

Metric Value
Monthly range $0 - $2 per TB stored (estimate)
Payout token Siacoin (SC)
Minimum payout $0 (no threshold, funds land in your own wallet)
Payout frequency Continuous: revenue reaches the node's wallet as contracts complete
Payment methods Crypto

You set your own prices. Sia recommends $1 per TB stored per month and more than $5 per TB downloaded, and 3.9% of every contract payout goes to Siafund holders. A new host stores nothing at first. Renters pick hosts by price, collateral and uptime, so income grows over weeks, not days. There is no provider-side payout step: renters pay into the wallet your node controls, and you sell or spend the SC whenever you want.

Requirements

Requirement Value
Residential IP No
VPS allowed Yes
GPU required No
Minimum storage 256GB
Siacoin up front Yes, for collateral and proof fees
Supported platforms Docker, Linux, Windows, macOS

The official Docker guide recommends, for a host that attracts contracts:

  • A quad-core CPU and 8GB of RAM.
  • A 256GB SSD for hostd itself, plus about 10GB of database per 1TB of hosted renter data.
  • At least 4TB of HDD storage offered to renters.

Uptime matters more than hardware. Sia cuts a host's score steeply below 98% uptime and says that a host which cannot keep 95% should not host at all. Below 80% you start losing collateral.

Setup Instructions

1. No account needed

Sia hosting is permissionless. There is no signup, no account and no API key, and there is no referral programme for hosts either.

2. Generate a wallet seed

A 12-word BIP-39 seed phrase controls the node's wallet. Generate one and back it up, because it is the only way to reach the earnings:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/siafoundation/hostd seed

The command prints the phrase and the wallet address. Anyone with the seed controls the funds. The volume and the container are not a recovery path.

3. Port forwarding

Forward these ports through your router or firewall to the machine running the node:

  • TCP 9981: Sia consensus, the node's peer-to-peer sync with the network.
  • TCP and UDP 9984: RHP4, the protocol renters use to form contracts and move data (SiaMux on TCP, QUIC on UDP).

Do not forward 9980. CashPilot binds the dashboard to 127.0.0.1 on the host, as Sia's own Docker guide does, because its API can spend the wallet.

4. Deploy with CashPilot

In the CashPilot web UI, find Sia (hostd) in the service catalog and click Deploy. It asks for:

  • Wallet seed phrase: the phrase from step 2.
  • Dashboard password: any long passphrase. It protects the web UI and the local API.
  • Storage directory: a host path on your largest disk where renter data will live, for example /srv/sia.

CashPilot keeps the consensus and host databases on a named volume and mounts the storage directory at /storage in the container.

5. Fund the wallet, configure the host and wait

Open the dashboard through an SSH tunnel from your own computer:

ssh -L 9980:127.0.0.1:9980 you@your-server

Then browse to http://localhost:9980 and sign in with the dashboard password. Wait for the node to finish syncing the blockchain, then:

  1. Send some Siacoin to the wallet address from step 2, to cover collateral and proof fees.
  2. Add a storage volume at /storage, the path the container sees.
  3. Set your prices and collateral. Sia's recommended starting values are on its configuring your host page.
  4. Announce the host.

Renters start sending data over days to weeks as your host builds a reliability history. If no contracts form after a few days, check that 9981 and 9984 are reachable from the internet.

Docker Configuration

  • Image: ghcr.io/siafoundation/hostd (official, by the Sia Foundation)
  • Platforms: linux/amd64, linux/arm64

Environment Variables

Variable Label Required Secret Description
HOSTD_WALLET_SEED Wallet seed phrase Yes Yes BIP-39 seed phrase controlling the host's Siacoin wallet
HOSTD_API_PASSWORD Dashboard password Yes Yes Password for the hostd web UI and local API
SIA_STORAGE_DIR Storage directory Yes No Host path on your largest disk where renter data is stored

Important Notes

  • Collateral is locked, not spent. It returns when a contract completes. If the node goes offline or loses renter data and misses a storage proof, it loses that contract's collateral and its revenue. Keep a small SC balance in the wallet too: a proof that cannot pay its fee is a missed proof.
  • Two kinds of state, two kinds of loss. The /data volume holds the wallet database, host settings and contract state. Losing it loses the node's identity, and the seed phrase stays the only recovery path for funds. The /storage directory holds renter data. Losing it fails storage proofs and forfeits the collateral locked against those contracts.
  • Earnings scale with data stored, not disk offered. Offering 4TB earns nothing until renters fill it.
  • No collector yet. hostd exposes a local REST API on port 9980 (/api/wallet, /api/metrics, /api/settings) that a future CashPilot collector can read, the same way the Storj collector reads the storagenode dashboard. Until then the balance is in the hostd dashboard.

Sources