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Comment by yoava | Hacker News Reader

Being from wix and managing petabytes of media files, we always wondered if a distributed web solution for websites can actually work.

Even with the best of clouds (more then one of the big names) we faced downtimes caused by multiple cloud failures.

Just imagine, a store that is Geo distributed, resilient and just works.

This is super exciting for the web and for customers of websites!!!

Big thumb up.

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Is IPFS really a store, let alone a store with any particular performance or availability properties? If I want to be sure a file is available, don’t I have to host it or pay someone to host it? And if I want to make sure it is geo distributed, I have to geo distribute it or pay a service to? What is the big change?

Wit IPFS you could rent a few cheap storage servers at different providers around the world and have them all pin your content. That should be resilient against most classes of failures (unlike a cloud provider where bad code pushed to production by the cloud hoster can cause failures in all availability regions).

It's not exactly the first protocol enabling that, but IPFS also has the benefit of distributing bandwidth if your clients all access the files via IPFS (since they will serve them from their cache).

I see, so geo distribution could be as simple as making the file available in multiple locations, with IPFS doing the rest.

IPFS is not a store, it's a protocol. You still have to pay someone to host it.

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