First, my apologies if this question has been discussed. I searched but came up with nothing quite on point.
Second, I am totally new to this – never even heard of this until a few days ago and I am VERY excited at the idea of liberating ourselves from the mega-giant corporate data brokers. Nice to be here!
The question: I have some geek skills and am considering hosting a pod, probably on a cloud server instance dedicated to that purpose. If all goes well – perhaps too well – and there’s a number of user accounts hosted there, and then, for whatever reason, my pod goes away. What happens?
When you lose your pod, and don’t have a backup, then all users from your pod are lost. But when you have a backup (which you should), or just shutdown your server, but bring it back online a year later, you can just continue using it where you left it.
Additionally to what @supertux88 wrote, there is the possibility that users can export their data. Eventually there will be the possibility that users can import this data on another server when the old one isn’t there anymore. This feature is defined in the protocol and already partly coded.
(Obviously this export has to be done when the server is still there)
So, it sounds like an abrupt shutdown without warning is very bad for users. There’s no automatic redundant whatever. I’ll keep reading and thinking about it.
One could host one’s own pod just for one’s own account, i.e., not accept any other signups, right? That might be a sane way to ease into it.
Yes, and when you don’t know how long you want to keep it, that’s probably the best idea. You can always open it later when you know you want to keep it, or close it again, when you think you have enough users.