Why would nodes in the IPFS network voluntarily act as a load balancer for my VPS? Usually I have to pay for load balancing, so I'm a bit suspicious when someone claims I can get it for free from IPFS.
Why would nodes in the BitTorrent network voluntarily act as a load balancer for your movies?
Same reason. Maybe you and I cannot explain the reason, but that does not mean that it doesn't happen. People don't always act in a 100% rational, for-profit manner, no matter what economics textbooks tell you.
(Edit: Of course the likelihood of your content being mirrored rises with the quality of your content.)
Take Wikipedia for example, even though it's changing very fast, I imagine a huge portion of it is static. If the latest version of each page was served via IPFS, somebody could setup a local mirror and people nearby would automatically use that.
In either case, if all the hosts go down and you didn't mirror it, you're screwed. However, IPFS makes it easier to mirror things.
I can see it being "really" useful as a backbone for something like Open Cobalt - http://www.opencobalt.net/ And I'm really looking forward to seeing that mature.
But the last time Open Cobalt seems to have been updated is 2010 - that's quite some time ago.
I wonder if it's being held up by patent trolls, but really all of them feels like more like a solution looking for a problem. That can take a very very long time to mature. Which is a shame.
(a) People currently downloading and viewing the site. Like bittorrent, the more popular a site/page is, the more people will be seeding it. (b) The Internet Archive.