What a Hosted Mining Plan Includes

A hosted Bitcoin ASIC plan is a colocation contract: you supply a machine, an operator supplies space, power, cooling, network, and often first-line maintenance. The plan states which services sit inside the rent, which are billed separately, and what stays yours, notably the pool, the firmware, and the payout address.

Sales pages sometimes blur "machine plus hosting" and "hosting only", and rates and lead times vary between sites. What follows describes the items to find in the contract itself.

The five items to require

Electrical power. Voltage, connector type, often an industrial IEC 60309 or equivalent, maximum current per machine, and above all the metering method: rack meter, PDU, or a flat per-model formula.

That last point deserves attention. Nameplate draw and billed draw can diverge by several percent: a fouled fan or aggressive firmware raises consumption without hashrate following. Record at minimum the billing unit, kWh, kW-month, or per-model flat, because it determines who carries that gap.

Space and mechanics. Rack or shelf, pitch, exhaust clearance, and for immersion the tank, the fluid, and the heat exchanger. An air plan never automatically includes a hydro kit. Check floor loading and the policy applied if your chassis exceeds the standard envelope, which happens with 3U formats.

Cooling and environment. Inlet temperature band, humidity, filtration. A site that does not publish those bands leaves you with no objective criterion for an overheating claim. Note that thermal uptime and electrical uptime are two different things: an overheated hall forces derating without ever tripping a breaker, so your hashrate drops while the contract remains formally honoured.

Network. LAN access to the public internet, open ports, sometimes a VPN or an administration jump host. The plan generally does not include the mining pool, which you configure yourself. Confirm who holds admin credentials on the machines and whether you get read-only access, without which you depend entirely on the host's dashboard to notice an incident.

Commissioning. Receiving, visual check, racking, first boot, and a hashrate test per the site's protocol. Note the contractual clock from parcel arrival to going online, along with what happens if the hall is full on delivery.

Maintenance: included against extra

Most plans mention basic maintenance: remote reboot, a fan swapped from stock, periodic cleaning, an alert when a worker disappears.

Three questions decide what that line is actually worth. Who pays for parts, hashboard, power supply, or controller? Who declares a board dead, and on what measurable criterion? Is a loaner machine provided during repair, or is your hashrate simply stopped?

Rarely included without a separate clause: manufacturer RMA with its shipping, firmware updates on request, pool changes, any overclock or underclock adjustment, all-risk insurance, and a physical visit by you. An "all inclusive" package that does not enumerate covered parts covers nothing verifiable.

Title, access, and exit

Four points to get in writing: who owns the ASIC, where it physically sits and who may move it, what happens on non-payment, generally a lien, and how you retrieve the machine at term, with the delay, the un-rack fee, and the freight.

The host is not the custodian of your bitcoin: rewards go to the pool you configured, to an address you control. That separation is what distinguishes a hosting contract from a cloud mining product.

Finally, ask how the incident log works: who notifies you, on which channel, within what delay. Without that clause you do not have a service plan, you have a monthly invoice.

What the plan does not cover

A hosting plan guarantees no profitability. Bitcoin price, difficulty, your machine's real efficiency, and the electricity rate decide the outcome, and none of those four belongs to the host.

Nor is it an availability commitment by itself: the service level and its associated credits sit in a separate document, covered in the article on reading a hosting SLA.

Checklist before signing

• The electricity billing unit is explicit, with its metering method
• Maintenance exclusions are enumerated part by part
• Machine ownership and installation location are written down
• The exit procedure specifies delay, fees, and shipping terms
• Read-only monitoring access is provided to you
• The incident notification channel and delay are defined
• The governing jurisdiction is identified

Any figure present on a sales page but absent from the contract should be treated as non-binding, however confidently it is presented.