A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
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Not necessarily. There are a good number of providers (e.g, Pinata, Infura) of “Pinning services”, which will host the data that you want to make sure it’s always available. At first sight, they might seem more expensive than just using something like S3, but if you consider that there is no egress costs for files on IPFS then it might end up a lot cheaper to host content there.
Feels like your services there just makes http links with extra steps?
Why would I want to use IPFS with those services instead of just online hosting?
Because you won’t be paying for distribution.
If you are just hosting data for yourself, sure, go ahead and stick with a regular storage provider. IPFS is useful for the cases where there will be many people who will be accessing that data. The more popular a file is, the more nodes in the swarm will have it and the less it will be requested from your node specifically.
If I share data on an online hosting I also doesn’t pay more for distribution? Or is this for some special cases? I havent checked for a long time but I had over 800Mb/s in like 2010 at OVH and I don’t think it has gone exacty down …
There is always a cap.
I assure you, IPFS has a cap too.
The question is, it is higher?
“IPFS” can not have a cap, because IPFS is not a service provider. IPFS is a protocol.
Fair enough.
So the IPFS network has a cap. Like OVH doesn’t have a cap as it’s a company, but their network does.
Are you trying to really understand how the thing works, or are you just looking for ways to dismiss the thing so that you can remain ignorant about it.
We’re talking about data transmission caps (as in, 1TB/month), not in bandwidth (as in 800MB/s) Also, IPFS is a protocol. The “cap” of the network is only theoretically bound by the amount of nodes running in it, but in practice it doesn’t really matter because the bandwidth of any single node will always end up being the real bottleneck.
So like torrenting?
If you could get a torrent file to display an image in your web browser, yes.
So regular web browser can browse IPFS only systems?
Yes. Brave has it built-in. Others can do it through an extension.
That’s cool, still can’t see why I wouldn’t use http(s) though that is cheaper and simpler?
“Cheaper and simpler” only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don’t want or can’t rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
Cool. :)
Yes, very much like torrents
If cost is a reason for concern, then the 5c/GB storage and 8c/GB egress on Pinata isn’t exactly cheaper than S3’s 2.7c/GB storage and 9c/GB egress. You can get much better mileage with something like Backblaze B2 0.6c/GB storage free egress, and couple with CloudFlare or other CDN for much lower egress (often free).
Sure there will be cheaper alternatives (Storj is $0.04 GB stored + $0.007 GB egress), but with IPFS you can e.g, seed from your own home server and not becoming a bottleneck.