Hosting contract renewals
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I think this is a very important topic for Sia as it has big potential in the data backup business. But one requirement for backups is that you can upload and forget, without worrying that your files will be deleted after a period of time.
Right now when a hosting contract expires the data gets deleted from the hosts and is lost forever. I could see how contracts can get renewed when the renter is online, but what happens when the wallet isn't started for a few months, or the user doesn't have the bandwidth to download and re-upload all his files every 40 days (the default expiry period).
Would it be possible to let the hosts make sure that the files will be available at all times?
@Taek mentioned earlier on Slack that renters often pay too much for their contracts and get refunded when the files expire, would it be possible to use that money to keep the files available for some more time?The automatic renewal by the renter could work if siad ran as a real daemon, starting when the system boots and closing when the system shuts down. Then it could go ahead and renew files in the background without the user having to worry about starting their wallet to keep their files online. The only thing the user will have to worry about is keeping the wallet funded, Sia could even remind users when the funds run low with a system tray notification or something. (File "foo.bar" will expire in 10 days, please deposit additional funds or this file will be deleted. Click here to learn how.)
Feel free to let me know what you think :).
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In general I am in full agreement with what is being stated here. We're dedicating a lot of work at this point to improving the renter and the host, and 0.5.0 will hopefully be pretty big in terms of functionality. If auto-renewing (without re-uploading) isn't ready by 0.5.0, it'll be ready in one of the other 0.5.x versions.
There will also be more controls for price, and better host selection algorithms.
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Totally agree. Hosting renewals when files no longer exists locally is an absolute must! I for one don't understand why this is not priority UNO!
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It's pretty close to priority number one. But it's also a difficult thing to do, at least to do efficiently. With our current erasure coding scheme, the only way to do a repair is to download the whole thing and then begin uploading it again. But Luke is now working full time on renter stuff, we should have a lot more features by Christmas.
