Topic: SporeStack: Launch VPS servers with Bitcoin. Anonymous, API driven - page 3. (Read 19788 times)

Bump.

Added a screenshot.

Bump.

Bitcoin SV now supported: https://sporestack.com/news/#2019-04-19

This is in addition to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Bump.

I'd like to announce SporeStack's new hidden hosting. You can launch a server over Tor that only communicates through Tor and is accessed through a Hidden Service.

More details here: https://sporestack.com/news/#2019-02-27

Or on our hidden service: http://spore64i5sofqlfz5gq2ju4msgzojjwifls7rok2cti624zyq3fcelad.onion/news/#2019-02-27

Also, V1 has been removed replaced with V2. Usage is quite different.

great work dude

i follow you from start and your service is one of the best


i like too zeit/now.sh but your service is similar

Hello, Teran,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  It’s rare to see such discussion.  I apologize for the delayed response.

Although I don’t know how Sporestack works internally, Lightning is actually ideal for your business model.  Your concern isn’t too clear, but I infer you think there is some need of per-customer accounting state.  If so, no, this is not the case.  It is not necessary to have a payment channel open with each customer.  You simply present customers with single-use Lightning payment requests which can encode much useful information, including the amount and the request expiration time.  Payment requests are designed to be embedded in QR codes, though you need a bigger QR code area than you do for a Bitcoin address.  This can be used by any customer who can find a route to your node (rather like the Internet itself).  Payments are source-routed; and there has been extensive work on onion-routing (exactly in the Tor sense).

Lightning overall keeps less state than on-chain transactions, insofar as the only global and/or permanently immutable state is in channel open/close transactions on the blockchain; information on individual payments is local and, if desired, somewhat ephemeral.  Also, you never really know where a payment is coming from, which should suit you fine.

Otherwise stated, Lightning will indeed support this business model:


Moving money respectively onto or off of your Lightning channels to fund a channel or “cash out” onto the blockchain is conceptually not too different than moving money between hot and cold wallets.  If you already run a Core node, clightning will work with that, too.

I may have more to say on these matters.  I do like your business model.  Yet to start with, I simply wanted to clarify about Lightning Network.

Well, this is unfortunate.  I’ve quietly had my eye on Sporestack for over a year, with an eye toward future projects.  As an all-Tor, all-the-time ghost in the.nym.zone with no means of payment other than Bitcoin, it seemed well suited to me.  But I’m prudent in saving my bits; and I did not have an urgent need for a VPS.  Thus, I simply checked in every few months to see the latest developments—and now, when I have a potential immediate need for service.

FYI, pushing the agenda of Bitcoin distorters and their kakocracy will exclude Bitcoin zealots as your potential customers.  Case in point:  Me.

I’d say good-bye at this point, but I am curious:  If fees were the problem, as stated on the Sporestack website, then why didn’t you add Lightning Network support?  LN mainnet became active soon after you started “highly [recommending]” fake-Bitcoin.  Come to think of it, I may soon need some means to anonymously set up a Lightning node in the cloud.

I’m also curious as to whether your recommendation still holds when with Segwit addresses, for almost two months now, I’ve been paying fees sometimes as low as 1 sat/B (!), never higher than 5 sat/B.

It is definitely possible. I had Dash or Monero as the next one on my roadmap, but Ethereum is another option.

I'll look into ShapeShift's API more and see if it can work for this. Bitcoin Cash was the most natural next coin to add. Now that I'm supporting two currencies, others should be much easier down the road.

I think ShapeShift would have to wait for at least one confirmation so it'd be quite a bit slower. It'd be much easier to work with if I can make a SporeStack payment token or internal credit system of some kind.

Thanks for replying!

I know Shapeshift supports but I do not know if they have an API you can integrate to, but wouldn't it be good to accept Ethereum as well? Has good prices and fast network confirmations. You can (as I mentioned, if possible) integrate through Shapeshift so you can get paid in BTC/BCH anyway.

SporeStack now accepts Bitcoin Cash: https://sporestack.com/news#2017-12-12

Migrating for Python 3 for the SporeStack library/CLI is recommended  but not mandatory at this time.

You guys should have a more permanent option.
I for one would love to start a vm on Vultr but due to their deanonymizing, I would like some other options..

Finally, prices are now automatically pinned to the dollar: https://sporestack.com/news#2017-11-03

This means the cost should be a lot more reasonable even when Bitcoin goes up some incredible amount in a single month. Unfortunately, sending transactions under 10,000 Satoshis can be tricky so there is a "price floor" there. You'll see much better rates at 7-28 days than 1-2 days. Not to mention TX fees as well.

-Teran

Another bump.

Just a bump.

Eh, kind of for redundancy. It's a long discussion for why I use ephemeral servers, but there's so many ways servers can fail past the hardware. You may erase something accidentally, it may be hacked, you may upgrade it and something may break. Which is why I make sure I can recreate servers without having any loss in functionality, at least for the most part. So rather than configure a server by hand I have configuration management do it, either shell scripts or Saltstack. And ideally you when you create a new server you update it at the same time. If there are failures you can still rely on the current server until you address whatever issues there are.

You can topup past the 28 day mark. There's actually kind of a bug that lets you topup indefinitely, but only in 28 day intervals. So I can spin up a server today with a 28 day lifetime and buy 28 day topups one after the other until my money runs out. With Bitcoin in general top up and prepay works better than postpay since you can't force someone to pay from an address, it has to be done before hand. I would still recommend automating topup if you choose to use it, so you don't buy a year's worth of hosting and then forget what to do next year (it seems silly but it happens, it's like SSL certificate renewal that way).

I agree, I need to add in price pinning to USD. That'll be one of the next features that come along.

I think I've been trying for a 100% margin, maybe a little less. But Vultr's 1GiB server is only $5 a month so that's $10 a month which I think is pretty reasonable. However the Bitcoin price keeps going up so I'm probably well over that now, and of course there are TX fees which are definitely more expensive paying per server than rather credit based for the account. I have surprisingly few complaints about cost and no time soon will I try to be the cheapest provider, only the most automated.

It really is a niche hosting service. There's a lot of unusual things you can do like launch servers that end up completely autonomous and self-sustaining. I did this with Tor relays: http://go-beyond.org/post/autonomous-crowd-funded-tor-relays/

One of the other cool next things you could do is have the servers try to mine cryptocurrencies and convert to Bitcoin to keep themselves alive longer. It may save you 10, 20, 30% in the long run depending on what you are mining.

Thanks for trying out SporeStack! Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thank you for your reply.

I guess in that way it is like Heroku but this is a couple layers lower, providing just the infrastructure and nothing like a Python app abstraction layer. Of course you could build that on top of SporeStack. I wanted to start with servers as the base layer and build from there.

The 28 day limit is intentional. I've designed it to be ephemeral by default, which is more of a modern practice and takes some getting used to. For the most part rather than upgrading the same server over and over, you'd just replace it with another. This has some advantages on my end as well.

The easiest way to see the price is to just try and spawn a server and see how many Bitcoins it requests. https://launch.sporestack.com/ shows it a bit better, but masks the flavors from you. You can guess the cost by looking here: https://sporestack.com/node/options

There's a base_satoshis_per_day. There's a random amount added onto that of 1-10,000 Satoshis that's used for identifying your payment. It's a very unusual system but you can see how it works here: https://github.com/teran-mckinney/bitcoinacceptor-python

Yes, currently all of the servers are created on Vultr. They accept Bitcoin as well, although I think you have to provide a credit card. They are great to work with. SporeStack adds an anonymous layer and I tend to prefer my API/tooling on top of it. Using Vultr directly is cheaper.

If you want a very traditional VPS and don't mind Vultr knowing who you are, they are a pretty good bet.

That said, you can "topup" your servers with SporeStack. There's a topup command so you can topup past the 28 day mark. Now down the road that may fail for some reasons. Say I start hosting these myself and there's a critical patch I need to apply to the host, say some security vulnerability. As a host you have two options: Take everyone down unexpectedly, live migrate to another host (more on that later), or let all VMs expire from the machine. So in that case I would mark the host to not have new servers built there and to not allow renewals. Once the servers expire (at very worst, 28 days from then), then I can patch it and restart it. Or say the server has to be moved from one datacenter or another, the same applies. You are going to have some unexpected downtime with public clouds unless they employ a lot of behind the scenes live migration. Which is doable but tricky to pull off, especially without any incidents at all. Some people do manage it well and I've never been a fan of it. In my mind, too many moving parts and there are cases where it doesn't work at all, if the host is degraded enough.

I would say the reliability of Vultr is about what I expect normally. Maybe a restart of a VM due to some host issue, once per 12 VM months? Maybe a bit more than that, just kind of a number I threw together. Occasionally there are boostrap issues where a VM does not boot at all the first time, maybe 1 in 80 or so, I'm not sure.

In general, servers will always fail so it's best to make a completely redundant architecture. Say you get to 99.99% reliability per server, adding another makes it almost improbable that you'll be totally down. Whereas adding more nines gets to be quite expensive.

In the future I may add more providers or try to host these myself. But in those cases the servers will only come up with iPXE -- different providers with stock images will just vary much too much and iPXE is probably the best way to make it more of a uniform platform.

Here's an example using self-renewing: https://github.com/sporestack/launch.sporestack.com

And my blog replaces itself every week: https://github.com/teran-mckinney/staticator/

I also have an example doing self-renewing and self-propagating: http://go-beyond.org/post/autonomous-crowd-funded-tor-relays/

Those examples are automated and work by sending Bitcoin to a new wallet that the servers use themselves. You an also watch for when the server is about to explore locally and run sporestack topup.

I hope this answers your questions. Let me know if you are curious about anything else.

I really like the concept of a fully API/CLI-driven IaaS platform. This looks to function similar to platforms such as Heroku which allow you to build applications through the command line. My only concern with the way you have built it is the 28-day limit which others have asked about but I still don't understand why it is there as well as the prices for the VPS servers not being visible, or at the very least I could not find them. If I may ask, are these servers built on top of another platform, and if so which? There seem to be quite many different locations that I don't think you would have set up yourself to host the servers on which these VPSs are run. I would like to know about the reliability and uptime of these servers.

I've added a AUTO region feature so you can specify "AUTO", "AUTO-NA", or "AUTO-EU" as the region (--dcid in the sporestack client). A datacenter with capacity will be randomly selected and used. Can be a better option than just using one datacenter and hoping it never fills up, especially in the case of automation.

https://sporestack.com/news#2017-08-21