I apologize. I somehow missed that thrown in there with flurry of replies going on.
That said, a wipe isn’t ever going to happen. Devs have already stated as much.
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If the owner stopping paying for a public server, what would happen to it? What would happen to the plots on it?
Could owners change the rules after it’s been created? Or are they fixed on creation?
Edit: would there be the opportunity to recover stuff before it’s turned off?
Like any other game where a player rents the servers, that is one of the downsides other players have to be aware of. It is certainly a downside. Servers can disappear at a whim when someone decides to stop paying for it. Happened to me enough times during ARK I opted to purchase and run my own server for 3 years. As someone who manages a server, one of the key things is staying in communication with your server players so they help craft a server everyone is overall happy with and knows about things that may be coming up, like a server going away for what ever reason. That’s one of the reasons why I make my game servers easy to acquire mats, but there’s a lot of other factors to it as well.
If we ever get rental servers I hope you’ll come try it out, though because of the way I set it up it wouldn’t be possible to connect to the main worlds.
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No one knows for sure how that’s gonna be handled (for the ones linked to the public universe), but I expect there would be a warning that it was gonna be taken offline so people would have a few days at least to get their stuff.
Figuring out how to handle those cases is probably the hardest part of adding a system like that, maybe even one of the reasons why it’s taking so long.
And then it would probably still be saved on a drive somewhere for a while, so if the owner started paying again all the built stuff would still be there.
As they say “there be dragons” 
The devs would also have the new problem of dealing with whitelist abuse. You could block someone until their beacon expired.
If the person doesn’t pay their “planet rent”, maybe there would be a 7-14 day warning afterwards to everyone with beacons on the planet that it will expire and all items will be lost so they can move their items.
If a paid planet starts to expire, would someone else be able to take it over and pay for it to keep it from crumbling?
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Wouldn’t the owner of the planet be the only one with the right to whitelist/blacklist?
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I don’t see why not but I think it would be best if that had a requirement of the original renter agreeing to transfer it to the new renter.
Yes but could they prevent someone refuelling?
You could buy and sell planets with their builds?
Unless they decide to wildly change the model from every other game out there that does rental servers, then no.
What often does happen is that the server owner is usually in close enough contact with the member base that they can give someone the server file info, and then they plug that file in to a new server opened up in that new persons name.
That’s how these things historically work, unless like I said they wildly change that model.
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I’m so confused I don’t know what I’d be voting for!
Well, that’s one of the differences between the ‘self hosted/modded servers’ and the ‘same rules, within public universe’ servers.
The second kind would be technically hosted by… whatever company hosts the current servers by necessity. Amazon I think? and be functionally identical to the existing planets, other than the ‘renter’ setting permissions.
It would be cool if one user could transfer to another, but wouldn’t that be a financial transaction that’s handled by BL?
I think people that don’t have GC are annoyed with GC members going AFK and their plots rotting while everyone tries to build something nice around them (No, I don’t think plots should be removed). If GC was turned into rented planets, it wouldn’t interfere with regular players’ builds.
If a lot of people build on my planet, and I commit sleeping-while-driving-at-150mph one night & my GC/planet club expires, maybe someone on the planet would be allowed to pay the rent and become the new owner?
The second way you describe is how most player servers are run these days, not self run from home on a second piece of hardware.
I’d assume in wonderstrucks case they’d use amazon, but for like ARK there were many companies that you pay a flat rate for and use their hardware for the server so no different than just having amazon host the servers in this case. The only difference is one company hosts servers instead of 10+ companies hosting servers and competing against each other with various pricing specials to compete for your cash.
Would be nice to set a sort of ‘inheritance’ option. I can see some people not wanting others to grab their planets if they stop paying for just a while.
I can also see more group-oriented situations where the original renter would like to allow other people to take over if they quit.
Probably a case by case situation.
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If I could afford two I would probably do two. One that’s completely private and one that has whitelist
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Yeah, after setting it up some Panda pointed out that some people might like to have multiples. 
I neglected to set it so multiple votes were allowed 
I bet many people might be interested in having both a modded one and a regular one.
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Exactly. Depending on the payment structure they set up, I could easily see renting 200$ worth of servers a month( other games/rental servers) that usually is about a dollar per user unless things have wildly changed. So if the servers are capped at 80 people then that’d be 3 servers basically. Of course other companies put their rental structures capped at say 30 players for 30$/month but that hamstrings you if your server setup wildly grows in popularity. They offer the option to expand the player cap but of course for an increased rate cost.
What I would like to do is have 3-4 servers and have some set up as pacifist, one set up as unbearable, and 2 more in between. Lots of ideas. Lots of fun. Just talking about this even though it’s probably a long way off has me jonesing about the possibilities.
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Except blacklist has a default of access granted, and whitelist has the opposite. I wouldn’t want to whitelist every player except the one I wanted to block I think that’s what @majorvex meant about having to block someone.