Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin relies on me being able to run it so...

hosting. That is, VPS.

What is the best service money can buy

- physical backups via DVD mailed to a specified address
- reputable
- reliable

Then again... one can always put an old computer in a corner in a relatives room.

I just want to see some discussion on it because in effect this is like how banks were years ago - looking after ones resources. Now I think I should know more of the details on that.

For example, I run my bitcoin on a machine with other things going on there. It could be better. I wonder if I should put effort into improving it. I could do this by renting a VPS... or then again go the whole hog and co-lo. But to colocate a machine just for bitcoin is over the top... backing-up the wallet or not....

Lots to think about.

I can get a bitcoind service going in no time:
- You get one bitcoin server with a wallet
- The wallet gets backup up every... hour? Or I can be smart and backup when new inbound addresses exist.
- You get to use it in an rpc port (not the default) probably only responding to specific IP addresses
- You can request physical backups sent to you periodically
- The bitcoind gets updated with security patches
- Includes (at least) getblock / listtransactions / rpcport patches, can include others by request

But you'll need to run your service against a specific port to talk to bitcoin, and you have to trust me :)

Is there interest in this? How much would you pay for it, knowing physical backups will be paid separately?

 I'd be interested, yes.

hmm... what would I pay.

 Well, the problem at the moment of course is the credibility and not being established. As a result of that I think I'd want to spread the load a bit between people providing this. So I'd have to pay less to spread the load across providers. Let's say spreading the load by a factor of 10 at the moment, but I'd love to cut that down to a factor of 3 as confidence builds.

In terms of what would I pay... it would have to be at least half as I would to a bank (whatever that is - the cost of banking is not clear where I am, they use hidden charges) so that I could have the funds in 2 locations for the same price (thus making the benefit even clearer)...
also... it would have to be alot cheaper than a full VPS of course.

re: RPC IP limiting...
perhaps just a web front end would be simpler, opened by port knocking with a browser to another port one number up from the http it's running on and closing again using a different port down number down from the interface. That way, with https login we're beginning to make internet cafe use possible.

Total guess here but I'd guess I'd pay $12/year at least right now. That works out $10/month for 10 accounts spread-loaded and $120/year for something that's a bit different to the bitcoin websites we already have.
What do other people think?