Topic: Bitcoin Cloud Wallet Hosting (Read 4433 times)

Microtronix is offering a 2 week promo for Bitcoin Wallet purchases, 50% off!!  From now until the 28th of Oct.!!

This is for new sign-ups only and takes 50% off for your first month of service, use promo code:

btcwal2011

While purchasing.

Thanks. I think my complaint is with the monolithic architecture of Satoshi's C++ client. A little Unix philosophy would have done bitcoin well. I'm very curious about what you can come up with. To lay my cards out on the table, I'm curious about decoupling tiers in order to save money and separate concerns. I'd happily pay a bitcoind operator without much thought or fear if I knew my wallet was hosted locally.

Sure not a problem.  What you are looking for is a centralized blockchain database hosted on some server.  Though this is technically possible yes, it requires a modified version of bitcoind.

Basically you would download the modified version and run it, it creates a new wallet on your local PC and runs off of the DB hosted on X server.  Yes this is possible, but not with our current service.

After your mentioning it, I might look into it, it would require running a berkley DB instance and modifying the bitcoind daemon to run off of a remote blockchain. But this is something we were going to look into anyways after our 0.4 upgrade to be able to lower the memory consumption of each bitcoind daemon.

I would be interested in investing into a new service for this yes, IF some more members of the forums showed interest in this.

Right now you cannot host the wallet.dat on your own machine with our current service since each bitcoind instance runs on the server and runs off of the users local files.

Right now our service is geared towards anyone starting in bitcoins that doesn't want to try running their own client or someone who is running a business and website and wants to run it through RPC but doesn't want to fork out the cash for an entire server.  Our service is perfect for that person since you can send RPC commands to your port from your web page and accept payments that way.  Also if you want your wallet to be available when your out through and RPC client on your phone, then our service is also great since you don't have to leave your PC running to have access all the time to your wallet.

But if some other members show interest in what your asking I would be more than happy to setup a new server for this purpose.  It of course wouldn't be immediate, it would be after our 0.4 upgrade since that is more pressing for current clients for security sake.

The solution is simple: if it's "loose", glue it.

http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=loose

Hey Jfreak53 it looks like you offer a great service. But it's not quite what I'm looking for (I don't want to lose any control of my wallet nor do I want to maintain a block chain). Most likely what I'm looking for doesn't yet exist, but I bet you've looked into the options more than most of us. May I ask a few slightly off topic questions?

Aside from your own secure account isolation, is there a technical reason the block chain can not be shared among all clients? ...and why can't the wallet.dat exist on my own machine?

Are you keeping tabs on the progress of the (node.js) bitcoinjs project? Are their other clients you are considering supporting?

Our cloud wallet now offers a brand new feature. Firstly we have fully web based administration of your bitcoind daemon program. You no longer have to have any knowledge at all of SSH to use our cloud wallet hosting, as of one month ago we launched an online panel with the following features:

• Start/Stop daemon
• Refresh daemon
• Add or remove IPs from the allowed IP list
• Change username/password of the bitcoind daemon for RPC connections

Screenshot:


We also are running our own version of bitcoind that has removed from it the ability to generate bitcoins, since a few clients were abusing this, and also has SSL pre-programmed into it, so you don't have to worry about any clients on the server at all using non-SSL connections and compromising the server itself. All clients now have to use SSL no matter what, and our filtering software only allows encrypted outgoing/incoming connections.

Our latest addition to the service is a fully web-based RPC client integrated into the webmin control panel where you administer the rest of your account. This RPC client has the following features:

• Transaction list of incoming/outgoing transactions
• Send bitcoins screen for sending to anyone
• Your address list
• Generate new address button

Basic features yes, but the most basic that most users will need to get started with their online wallet, from it you can do most tasks that you would need to do.

Screenshots:




It is also the most secure RPC client since not only does it use HTTPS for connections it connects on localhost, so no transmission is outside of the server to your client. Also it is all automated, it automatically gets your port, user and password from your users bitcoin.conf file, so no having to enter information or worrying about getting it from somewhere un-secure.

So now you can signup for our service then administer and use your wallet all from the web without extra knowledge of how to use SSH or the conf file.

Our next upgrade will include upgrading from 0.3.24 to 0.4 of bitcoin for encrypted wallet's all the time, of course this is taking some time since we are extensively testing the new bitcoin version to make sure there are no major bugs that will mess up wallet's.

Not so much misleading since it hasn't been asked yet and since we really don't measure it that way but more in IO of each client and the amount of traffic it gets.  Each bitcoin server has 4GB of ram, each client takes up from 150 to 200MB depending on how many connections, but we do limit each client using Kernel tools to a max of 300MB to make sure that no one client can take the server down and effect other clients.

We can fit anywhere between 10 to 15 clients per server depending on their usage.  For instance, if on one server we have all personal wallet's we put 13 to 15 clients.  But if on another server they are using the wallet for business transactions and they get heavy traffic we limit that server to only 10 or 8 to make sure no overload.

It's more based on IO since each client uses the wallet DB that causes a lot of IO and block DB which is worse.  Using some information in another thread of the forum here we are actually in the process of re-compiling our client to run with less IO, we are actually thinking of re-compiling using a central blockchain DB so less IO and RAM is used in total.  Don't know yet but we have our programming department going over that area to see if it's really possible and that would allow more clients per server and less resource consumption per client.

So it's not really measured in Ram or anything else like a normal hosting package would be.  We monitor each account for traffic only, that is how we know how busy their client is.  If they have thousands of requests daily to their port then we know they are a high consumption client, it's just hosting, we monitor traffic to an account to see it's use and limit per server depending on that traffic.

Really nice work jfreak53. Some misleading text however. How much ram do you provide for the server running bitcoind?

Kind regards
Kris

Nasakioto:

Thank you for the great post.  We strive to keep you, our customers, happy. I'm glad we have been able to   I love to see happy posts

Joe:

We actually do but they are not publicized since once they are they go like hotcakes and we can't keep up ha ha, but we do offer unmanaged VPS hosting at discounted prices.

For a price quote just go to our client page:
http://clients.microtronix-tech.com

And open a sales ticket to quote a VPS.  Basically give us the specs you want and we try to match them the best we can with unmanaged services.

Or you can just go to our main site: http://www.microthosting.com

And go to live chat, one of the operators will gladly quote you a custom VPS plan over chat.  And of course all payable with bitcoins

It's slightly offtopic, but are you by any chance planning to offer (low-priced) unmanaged VPS hosting in the future as well? I think it would be nice to have more unmanaged hosts that accept Bitcoin

I think that's a great idea. It'll save a lot of merchants hassle having to install and secure their own daemon on their ecommerce servers.

We use Microtronix for some of our ixcoin.org hosting and I have nothing but praise for them. Great support and lots of features/addons.

For those of you who have IXCoin and want IXCoin online wallet we now offer this.  When signing up just select the client you want.  I know this is not the right forum, but since some run double systems just thought we would mention it.

There is a post over at the other.

Also if there is a forked client that you would like to see let us know here and we will see if we can setup a daemon for that client.

Most definitively we offer just backup services.  What you would do is purchase our backup service at $4 a month for 10GB of space, and you purchase managed backup services or have us setup the backups.  Then you either state in the comment or in a ticket the login information to the place where your wallet.dat file is stored, we will then generate keys and setup your backup for you.

The other option if you don't have access for that is to just upload your wallet.dat file and on our backup server once a day and we will setup some automated scripts to run after your backup is made and encrypt your wallet then remove the old unencrypted .dat file.

Either way it is possible, it would come under our regular backup services just managed services on the order form.

And thank you for the information on the page, I will have someone run through it since it was thrown up real fast the other day, hadn't realized myself yet.

This is a really cool idea.  If you were to offer JUST encrypted wallet.dat backup service, I might be interested in that too.

By the way there are a ton of grammar errors on your page at http://www.microthosting.com/bitcoin-servers.html.  You might want to have someone do a nice run through it and fix them, it looks very very unprofessional.

Otherwise, nice job.

never wanted to say you are slow

Services are running now and the support is absolutely great! I am a total noob and a very patience stuff member hepled me till i was able to connect to everything.
So i only can say that i am more than happy and give a 1+++ for your service!

N.Z.:

1.  Yes we agree, this is why only one single tech admin has access to the servers in question, when we add more we add one tech per 3 servers.  So that one single tech is the only one with access to the server, besides myself the owner of the company.  We carefully pick the tech who does, we have worked with a very good NOC in Chicago for many many years and they are one of the best in the country for security.  Hence we are not worried about this.  To be honest we are more worried with the occasional hacker who thinks he's good enough ha ha

2.  Yes these are all ideas, we are working daily to find new threats and new entries.  We actually have one server that we setup for the sole purpose of hacking into ourselves.  We test it from every possible angle WE can think of and see what we find that is missing.  Whatever is missing we add to our production servers running bitcoin clients.  So we are constantly looking for more ways of securing each client.

This is the reason when we backup your wallets for you we back them up using PGP 4096 bit encryption.  If the receiver doesn't have the private key, well then sorry your sunk you can never open the wallet, ever.

Our goal would be to find a client that encrypts the wallet file from the get go and keeps in encrypted, that way there is double security on that file during runtime, we have yet to find this.

mameise: Glad your liking it so far, hope your service is running beyond adequately.  Things were a bit slow yesterday for first comers, since no matter how hard you plan you just can't get ready for a wave .  But we are slowly ironing out the setup glitches and getting things running smoothly for signups.  New service, not automated yet so it's a bit slow setting up.

But all that said about slow, we would rather spend our time getting the security great than fast setups any day , that is what we've been working on.

Carefully read first post. Well I must admit if all this stuff is the really way this server runs, it will be hard to break in. Although I have questions:
1. What about physical access to server? Someone would have full access to server=wallets, so it should be a really trusted person.
2. What about SELinux and other hack-hardening stuff? Like multifactor authentication (spare change->wallet->full account access), multiple wallets, diversification and other hard-spelling words cool things?

Also consider using asymmetric encryption in the way that no one (even you) could break to the wallet without knowing of the pass-phrase. I do not know how it should be implemented, but I think it is the only secure way of storing such important data as btc wallets. Imagine some three-letter agency come and steal you server for "investigation" of one of accounts. Noone could stop it of stealing all wallets at once. At least you should have one big red button of server self-destruction A bit paranoid, of course, but its better than having all your money lost one day

I just ordered it to test. I also ordered a normal Hosting with a Domain and payed with btc.
Domain is registered and I can access control panel. BTC Hosting is still in progress.

Looks very good till now. Thanks!

Quite true since the client has to have it open at all times.  At this point in time it seems to work just fine, the only leak we can find is the account itself, in other words someone would have to get into the Linux OS first to get to the wallet.

From outside right now it looks decent, we have tried quite a few attacks ourselves to the client from the outside and found a few places that we patched up between the client and the firewall.  So all is good there but not many, just basic things.

I still would be interested to know if someone in the community is in active development of a much much better daemon client for bitcoin??  Is there anyone?  Or does anyone want to?  As I said, as a company we would be willing to pay for a better daemon client, something that reads and writes an encrypted wallet file and also has some better protection on it's daemon conf file and password information as this is a major part.

If someone is looking into this please let us know as this is the one part we are still looking to better in the server itself.

As I said though, as of right now to do the hacks you are stating one of two things.  Either the hacker would have to get into the Linux server through the user account, so the clients PC would have to be compromised or the users API password would have to be compromised from his personal PC as well.  So either way the hacker would have to get INTO the linux server to get to this point.

But please by all means, if someone is developing a better daemon client please let us know, we are all ears

Still doesn't stop someone ARP poisoning the client and sniffing the key exchange. But that wasn't my point I was merely saying that the bitcoin daemon could be insecure and open to remote exploits. The biggest gaping hole in this setup is the bitcoin daemon I would of thought ? I was just interested if you have done some pen testing on the bitcoin daemon ? 

Will be good to see how it all pans out for you GL !!