4. The Hosting Handbook

The Hosting Handbook

  • R

    Thank you Taek for the explanation. I was guessing in the right direction, now I understand.
    I remember I have seen somewhere the descriptions for other parameters too but can't find that page...

    The most strange parameter for me was "collateralbudget". The name is obvious and explaining enough but I wondered about the default value 1MS. It looks insane high for beginners (like me).
    Basically the upper limit for total locked collateral is the SC amount in wallet or the collateralbudget parameter- whichever is lower.

    I think the next tip in this thread should be about backup and disaster recovery for the hosters- what to do to be able to recover the hosting contracts and data. For example, does it make sense to back up all the shared storage folders and siad "application folders" (host, consensus, transactionpool, etc.)? What happens if the recovery takes some time as new hardware has to be bought, installed and configured? And the renter makes changes, uploads new and deletes old data in that time? In other words- can a hosting node recover itself by syncing active contracts after a 1-2 day downtime? It should, but is it so? And here we come back to collateral... How much collateral could be "lost" in such scenario? Would the renter notice that the redundancy is/was reduced (temporarily)? Or would the renter just take all the collateral and make a hosting contract with another node which is running at that time?

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  • admins

    The most strange parameter for me was "collateralbudget". The name is obvious and explaining enough but I wondered about the default value 1MS. It looks insane high for beginners (like me).

    That default is a leftover from when 1 MS was worth close to $100. Those days are of course long behind us. We'll have to update the defaults.

    For example, does it make sense to back up all the shared storage folders and siad "application folders" (host, consensus, transactionpool, etc.)?

    It's a good idea to keep the actual wallet folders themselves (the host, wallet, consensus, etc. directories) running on raid10, or maybe even triple mirroring. If you lose those, you lose the whole host. The storage folders aren't as important to keep backed up, the host can gracefully handle losing one. That said, RAID5 across 5 or 6 disks is probably not a bad idea.

    What happens if the recovery takes some time as new hardware has to be bought, installed and configured? And the renter makes changes, uploads new and deletes old data in that time? In other words- can a hosting node recover itself by syncing active contracts after a 1-2 day downtime? It should, but is it so?

    The renters will tolerate about 2 days of downtime before moving to other hosts. If you have less than 24 hours of downtime, you aren't at risk of losing collateral. Sia is generally pretty generous about letting you take the hosts offline for maintenance/upgrades. But you want to complete it within a few hours ideally, and you don't want to have to do it too often (once a month or so).

    The renter will notice that you are offline, but as the renter is using a ton of hosts to store data redundantly, the renter is going to forgive that downtime as long as the other hosts are still running. Over the course of 30 days, try to have >95% uptime, and over the course of 1 week try not to have more than 24 hours of downtime.

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  • R

    @Taek
    Thanks again!
    So I conclude from your post that it is better to have a copy (mirror) of the live system data than a daily or hourly snapshot. That's a bit more complicated than taking snapshots (one of zfs features I like most) as usually mirrors are on drives attached locally in the same host.
    About backing up the hosted folders.
    I don't agree it's not so important to back them up, as the folders can be pretty large, and if you imagine that you need to restore say a terabyte by re-downloading it from the internet...
    My main concern is about loosing sync between the hosting contract database and the actual contents in the hosted folders. What happens if I don't loose the folder but the contents are different from what host process expect to see (restored from a snapshot copy).
    Anyway, do I understand right that for disaster recovery (lost folder recovery) it is advisable to add a bunch of smaller folders to the host instead of one large? What would be "the optimal" size for the host to handle?

    In between. From where would a hosting node recover a lost folder?
    The renter? Would it impose upload fees to the renter? Technically it would be an upload for the renter but requesting to pay for that wouldn't be fair (not to name it robbery).
    Other hosting nodes (redundancy hosts)? Then the before failed host should pay the download fee to the hosts from where the folders are being restored. But does a host know where are the other copies of its data (from where to download)?

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  • M

    Hello,

    I am interested in your Project Business Model & its future implications on data storage industry.

    I would like to know that what is the recommended max collateral to be put at stake for becoming a host?

    Though I have seen insane amount of 50,000/- SC, on this forum I would like to know that is it true? Also, Iin my opinion in USD terms USD 50 to 100 is a fair enough collateral to start with. Am I right?

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  • M

    @mimran play with it, and see how it affects your income! I don't think there are enough hosts on the network yet to have formed a baseline on what is right and wrong for any of the parameters affecting the price of storage / the income of hosters.

    However one thing should be clear: there's no one size fits all approach to this question. Sia is all about differentiation and optimization. If you want to host large files for a long time (a la Amazon Glacier) then your config is going to be different from the hoster who is optimizing for website file distribution (a la Amazon CloudFront).

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  • O

    Hi, Can I both host files and dual mine Ether/Siacoins on the same mining rig? Sorry my ignorance I'm a newby here

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  • D

    Hi all,
    I should be getting my QNAP NAS online tonight with a few TB's to offer up (in RAID5).

    My question centers around illegal content. How can the blockchain / Developers monitor this, obviously MS/Amazon have teams dedicated to removing suich content and shutting down the accounts of those who upload it. While I'm sure 99% of users are legit, I absolutely do not want that stuff anywhere near my life / family / NAS.

    I had a quick search but couldn't see anyone asking this, I'm sure they have though.

    Thanks

    Dave

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  • R

    @ds2000
    all data stored by others on your host is encrypted and only partial. So you can't know what you are storing.
    There is only one having access to all parts and keys for the file- that is the renting node.

    If you can't live with that in mind, don't host (share) your storage space.

    1
  • M

    Hello.

    Parts about how price affects Score needs update because it does not correct after this code update 2 month ago:

    https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/commit/a85353d8cec915ff2632eec32283a12dafcf0107

    -priceExponentiation = 4
    +priceExponentiation = 5

    Those parts are incorrect:
    Every time you cut your price in half, your score will go up by 16x.
    If you cut your total cost in half, your score will go up by 16x.
    The price penalty only really becomes relevant if your collateral is more than 5x your total cost. Generally speaking you want to target 2-3x collateral vs. price.

    That is, every time you double your collateral, your score doubles as well. 3.9% of your collateral contributes to the total price, which has a 16x multiplier on it when you double the total price. So if doubling your collateral is enough to move the total price by more than about 20%, it'll actually cause your score to drop instead of increase

    1
  • P

    @Taek said in The Hosting Handbook:

    If you are running a renter (this is the default - if you aren't, you probably know it), you can see a full list of hosts by running siac hostdb -v. This will display the scores of the hosts in your database.

    It doesn't show a score for me. Were there any changes made to the implementation since this thread was opened 5 months ago or am I doing something wrong?

    0
  • R

    @pachisi456
    I wondered about this too.
    Now I can tell the hostdb -v method is not reliable.

    The hostdb is maintained by the renter module. As your renter will not rent from your host (itself) it does not include it in the hostdb.
    So, to get your hosts score you need to run a separate node (different seed) and look in that nodes hostdb.
    And there is another catch. The renter module queries only the top 200 of hosts regularly for settings, the others only occassionally.
    For example my host settings got refreshed by the renter only once in two weeks as my host is not in the top 200.

    So the easiest and in my opinion most reliable way to check the hosts score is looking for the host in the Siahub host directory. I think Siahub uses a modified/customized module that queries all hosts.

    0
  • P

    @reinisp
    Thanks! Good answer.
    Just realised that the way I've put my question was a bit misleading. What I've meant is that when I run siac.exe hostdb -v I don't see ANY scores, just the list of hosts with prices etc. How can I see the actual score number of a any host?

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  • R

    @pachisi456
    The hostdb -v output gives you the host list sorted according to score.
    So the last one you see has the best score.
    The overall score is shown in the column following the announced address. and before the column showing the price.

    In the column named "Pubkey" you see the hashes of the nodes (beginning with the "ed25519:").
    If you want to read a hosts settings and score breakdown you should copy the whole hash, then
    siac hostdb view <pubkey of a particular host>
    gives you the settings of that.

    For example:
    siac hostdb view ed25519:181be570a6b1b80e07775f0cb26ae92d654c74daa8d11e4a043b8289409ec2b9
    gives you

    Host information:
  Public Key: ed25519:181be570a6b1b80e07775f0cb26ae92d654c74daa8d11e4a043b8289409ec2b9
  Block First Seen: 124977

  Host Settings:
    Accepting Contracts:            true
    Total Storage:                  10899 GB
    Remaining Storage:              10446 GB
    Offered Collateral (TB / Mo):   200 SC

    Contract Price:            2 SC
    Storage Price (TB / Mo):   13 SC
    Download Price (1 TB):     200 SC
    Upload Price (1 TB):       0 H
    Version:                   1.3.0

  Score Breakdown:
    Age:           0.500
    Burn:          1.000
    Collateral:    37.333
    Interaction:   0.655
    Price:         1085.014
    Storage:       1.000
    Uptime:        1.000
    Version:       0.700

  Scan History Length: 53
  Overall Uptime:      1.000
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  • O

    Hi!

    What is and how to increase the Interaction score?

    0
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