Sia Central July Update
I have never posted a comprehensive update on the state of Sia Central, but it has been a very busy month. I launched Sia Central’s first service, Host Manager, on Sia’s community discord just over a year ago. Sia Central has always been about providing useful, powerful, and simple tools for users of the Sia network. Our API and services have grown over the past year to serve over 4 million requests per month. It’s been amazing to watch these services grow from nothing and get so much positive feedback from Sia’s community.
You may have been affected by Sia Central’s outage this month. On the 20th at 2AM PST the boot drive for Sia Central’s dedicated server died suddenly and without warning. The server had system monitoring in place to try to detect failures early, but no alerts were triggered and a SMART test had completed with no errors a few days prior. Sia Central’s services were entirely reliant on this single point of failure. A new SSD was quickly installed by the datacenter’s customer support, but the database backups and indices took an extremely long time to rebuild.
To prevent extended downtime and outages in the future, a second server has been deployed to serve users relying on Sia Central’s services. The two servers are now load balanced with automatic failover and a new status page has been deployed to https://status.siacentral.com/. This page will update with status alerts during any future service interruptions.
Lite Wallet
Sia Central’s lite wallet is a simple and secure browser-based cryptocurrency wallet allowing users to send and receive Siacoin without syncing the blockchain.
Wallet creation and recovery has been slightly changed. There is now a checkbox to confirm that your wallet seed has been saved to a safe location. Backing up your wallet seed is incredibly important, without your seed there is no way to recover your funds.
In addition, the lite wallet has been updated to show a wallet’s Siafund balance, and you can now export your entire transaction history, including host payouts, to CSV format.
The biggest addition to Sia Central’s lite wallet has been support for the SCPrime fork of Sia. With this, Sia and SCPrimeCoin wallets can be managed together. This is the only fork of Sia currently supported by Sia Central.
Support for sending Siafunds is currently being tested and work has started on an iOS app with file storage, but progress is slow since Host Manager v2 currently has top priority.
Host Manager
Host Manager is a powerful desktop app for storage hosts with tools to accurately track financials and monitor their status.
Publicly, it has been a quiet few months for Host Manager. Two new versions of Host Manager were released. The included Sia daemon was updated to v1.4.11. Electron, the framework Host Manager is built on, was updated to the latest version and a memory leak affecting larger hosts was fixed.
The long awaited Host Manager v2 is about to be released to early adopters. This is a massive upgrade for Host Manager. It includes a completely redesigned backend, better onboarding, a browser-based interface for headless servers, and remote management for hosts. The final release will be offered as a desktop app, a daemon, and a docker image.
Transak
Both Host Manager and Lite Wallet have integrated the Transak fiat-to-crypto gateway. This means you can now purchase Siacoin directly within Host Manager or Sia Central’s Lite Wallet with your debit card.
