Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

How would it solve the problem?

Well, since it's distributed / decentralized you wouldn't depend on a particular company (or service). This way you wouldn't need to worry about it being shut down.

You would still depend on the constant availability of an origin for your data.

IPFS is not magic in that regard: if whoever is your origin disappears, then your data is likely to disappear at some point, especially if it's not super popular.

There is no free lunch: you either become your origin yourself, or you pay someone else to be.

But because it's distributed, you can be the origin for hundreds of pages on a tiny $5 vps and when popularity increases you would not have to shoulder all the load.

Though : would that lunch be as expensive as $10 per month or would it be almost free like $0.1 per year ? I consider that to be pretty much free :)

Here's a pricing example: https://www.keycdn.com/pricing

Can't speak for Dat, but for IPFS, your content is alive so long as at least one node has the site pinned. (Think of it like seeders for a torrent)

With torrents, long tail stuff frequently runs out of seeders, no?

Yep! But there should hopefully be an efficient + cost-effective incentive for others to host your content when they implement FileCoin.

Or you could just host it on your own devices, so long as you're okay with it only being reliably accessible so long as at least one device is up and running.

The difference with regular torrent seeders is that they have no incentive to seed once they have the content. In this case the main purpose and goal is to "seed" and provide content to others, so the long tail should be more resilient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com