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Comment by styfle | Hacker News Reader

Here is one really important part that I almost missed when reading this announcement:

> Using Cloudflare's gateway, you can also build a website that’s hosted entirely on IPFS, but still available to your users at a custom domain name.

This is huge step forward for the distributed web!

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The killer app for IPFS in this early days should be people who are paying $10/mo to host their half-dozen HTML files on WhateverHost companies everywhere. Bonus points if they are hosting heavy files, like podcast files, for example.

Is there a Soundcloud clone on IPFS anywhere? (One that doesn't provide you with cloud storage, only the public index)

Is there a way (even not free) to ensure that my data in IPFS is always available (at least as available as with "traditional hosting services)?

That's a bit of a requirement when building a serious service/website.

CAP theorem.

Perhaps you can elaborate?

What we're talking about only requires the A and the P.

As I understand it, the way is: run an IPFS node (perhaps on a cheap VPS); use `ipfs pin ` to force the node to retain the file even if it isn't being requested.

Presumably someone could sell "pinning as a service" for fairly cheap: a popular file will be widely cached, so the service will rarely need to provide it; and an unpopular file will be rarely requested.

Isn't pinning as a service essentially a CDN?

Is there a reason to believe that such service would be cheaper than a "traditional" CDN?

https://www.eternum.io

I'm working something like this. The idea is that the artist hosts their own server and payment gateway, and therefore receives all the profits from any sales they make.

Adding IPFS ontop of this would make it more robust.

I'm interested (although I'm not an artist nor I have any stuff to host besides my own rants).

You can use any gateway to do that :)

Cloudflare offering it might legitimize IPFS in ways that non-corporate entities championing it doesn't.

Not a huge Cloudflare fan, but I will admit this is cool of them to spend engineering time and money on.

EDIT: Thanks for the efforts to promote the Distributed Web. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

That's the whole point. We think the Distributed Web is cool and coming and we want to accelerate that happening. Hence the time and effort to make this happen.

Bravo

I was just wondering the other day if IPFS would get enough traction to reach critical mass. This is a very hopeful sign I think.

Cheers!

That was one of the drivers. We liked the core technology, but could see there was a significant barrier to actually using it. Being able to point your domain at IPFS content and then providing that (ssl secured) site to the masses is a big step forward.

A most welcome feature.

That is wonderful to hear

You can use any gateway with your custom domain name? Potentially you could but I don't know of any that let you do this.

My impression of the public gateways was that the end user would need to know the content hash of your website which makes for a poor user experience.

This announcement claims the end user just uses the website as they normally would by visiting example.com but behind the scenes there is no central web server because the content is pulled from IPFS.

DNS was the missing piece :)

https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

You can use custom domains with any go-ipfs gateway, it'll transparently turn `Host: example.com` into `/ipns/example.com`.

What Cloudflare adds to the mix is their infrastructure for automatic TLS certs.

I was running my own website with my own domain on ipfs quite successfully for few months. And I have configured cloudflare just to have a green https icon.

The only problem is that I have to visit my website once in a while, otherwise the content is deleted on the gateway.

We wrote a tutorial on setting it up on your own (secure nginx server for ipfs gateway), https://medium.com/textileio/tutorial-setting-up-an-ipfs-pee.... But for sure, for most users, going right through cloudflare is an awesome simplification. Exciting stuff.

Can you?

You will still need to run a node to host your own content on IPFS. Unless you just simply plan on using data that already exists in the wild

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