I downloaded Storj a few months ago to test out renting some of my hard drive space, and after a couple months, it just wasn't worth it. I had allocated 500GB and over those two months had only got enough contracts to take up only a couple dozen megabytes.
Add to that the necessity to keep my computer on 24/7 or be penalized (My understanding of this wasn't quite clear at the time, so maybe this isn't true?) and it simply wasn't worth the effort, even though it required virtually no effort of my own.
I'd be willing to give it another try in the future, but my first impression wasn't very favorable.
The reality is you need to have a significant amount of storage to share on a system that is connected nearly 100% of the time. But at that level, you also need a fast internet connection and unlimited data for it to work. I think the vision of everyday people sharing a few hundred gigabytes each is unrealistic. Average users don't keep their PC on all the time, have unlimited Internet, and plenty of drive space to share.
Sure, but it shouldnt be like this. If you programm it the right way and share copies of the files on hundreds of PC, you must have a more stable and faster connection than AWS3. With time goes by, hoster will switch to storj - or do I miss something.
Sometimes you cant influence your internet connections. This is very annoying to know, you wont get good results.
But anyway I dont see, why anyone in the crytoworld would seriously invest in hosting infrastructure, when you can print you own money anyway by simply mine some coins.
I think its just a nice add on for miners/ servers who run anyway 24/ 7.