I am thinking of setting up a website where you can pay to have a server host your Syncthing folder, and synchronize it with your devices.
It would work like this: First, you enter a folder ID and all your device IDs. After submitting, you get a Bitcoin address. You then pay Bitcoins to that address. As soon as the money arrives, a node will start synchronizing with your devices.
To start, I would go with an offer of 5 GB per folder at 0.50 € per month. For hosting, I’d probably rent a VPS in Germany.
Would you be interested in that?
Disclaimer: This is my own idea, none of the other Syncthing devs are involved in it.
I like Syncthing because i own my cloud, i control it and i know where are my data. Syncthing do not offer encryption like BTSync, and store unencrypted data to a provider is not a good idea.
For that, there is Dropbox / OwnCloud / many other cloud storage solution
While I think that this is a very good idea and very useful for the proprietary-solution-weary non-techies. However, I probably wouldn’t advise setting up such a service. If somebody were to use this for illegal filesharing, and your provider were to find out about it, you wouldn’t even have anybody to blame thanks to bitcoin transactions.
Unless you plan to integrate encryption yourself - I’d wait…
I think ultimately a service like this would be useful, but the two pain points, in my mind, are the legal side and handling people exceeding their quota in a nice way.
With the legal side, taking responsibility for the safety and security of people’s data is a big deal, particularly if you’re being paid for it. How will you handle a breach? Do you need to insure against being sued? Do you need to pay for an audit? It’s not something I would consider tackling unless I had a lawyer on my payroll. Who’s going to write your legalise: the disclaimers and suchlike?
Encrypted nodes would help, but even then it’s not something I would consider without legal advice.
I am guessing there is a % of users who would benefit from having an “always on / always connected” device in their cluster. They may not wish to pay $5 - $10 per month for a VPS (or, they may not know how to set one up).
In that sense, you have a potential business idea here.
However, I think it’s a non-starter until the Syncthing encrypted nodes concept is a reality. Transferring and storing unencrypted data feels like a large security risk for both the customer and the service provider.
I am not sure about that. I think theses users will use real cloud system such as Dropbox becauses Dropbox like solution are more flexible for this usage.
It’s always encrypted in transit. That said, I agree with the sentiment that this is more valuable, and more in line with Syncthing philosophy, when you know the cloud provider cannot access the data.
With that in place I think the private plus “just add cloud” model could be attractive for some.
Another feature that would be valuable in this setup would be the “Remove nodes”-feature in introducer mode. Adding a new device might be cumbersome without introducer-on on the one hand, but removing a node with introducer-on is cumbersome right now…
Okay I agree with you all that this only really makes sense when the files can be encrypted on the server. I’ll probably come back to this when we have that feature
I’m more interested in offering services that get and send data through Syncthing. For example, static website hosting, computation services, image processing etc.
But this would require a way to filter incoming files. It is possible to do, but I don’t know the inner workings of Syncthing yet to start writing a tool to do that.
I have not looked at the existing relays to see if you can restrict access to them but I assumed you can’t. If it was to be a high bandwidth subscription model you would need to make sure you could restrict access to it obviously.
Currently no. But the thought hit me during development that it could potentially be something one could charge for. If so, I’d write a mechanism where a license server grants a certificate to the client, and the client presents that to the relay in order to prove it’s allowed to use the service.
That sounds like a good application for Bitcoin micropayment channels (because something like credit cards would be rather difficult to set up for customers, and fees would be too high).
One, if not the main, reason I went for Syncthing over e.g. DropBox, Jottacloud or iCloud is the fact that I have full control over the data and storage myself. I have two nodes running 24/7, one at home and one at the office, storing my files on encrypted file systems.
That certainly don’t say that others may find paid hosting useful though, as hardware for nodes and bandwith don’t come for free either…
