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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate the work of getting this up and running; it's certainly a good exercise in making a fully-distributed content site.

What I'm missing is where a collection of static files couldn't just be served up from an S3 bucket and Cloudfront or Cloudflare on the front end -- you arguably have the same caching performance if not better since Amazon and Cloudflare have real SLAs for getting your bits from your bucket to a user's browser.

IPFS seems like un-needed complexity when there are a huge amount of options available. If you personally don't like Amazon, you can use Github pages, or DigitalOcean, or Netlify, or Fastly, or the list goes on and on.

Does anyone have a use for IPFS that isn't already covered by existing hosting+cdn options?

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You can have both. Cloudflare has an IPFS gateway that you can use with a Cloudflare domain. Content hosted in IPFS and CDN-ed via Cloudflare's network. An IPFS-capable client will bypass Cloudflare via the dnslink entry.

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

Except then you still have to cover the demand from requests which bypass Cloudflare through the dnslink entry.

Essentially it's a gimmicky system which is propped up by using Cloudflare, which ultimately fails once it actually gets user adoption, in a way the tradition setup (CDN + basic or even free hosting) would not. This only works because most users don't have IPFS support currently, and if they did the servers would grind to a halt just as they would with no CDN at all.

IIUC the theory is that the clients using native IPFS will be caching the content for a period of time and serving it to other IPFS clients. Therefore the load should be shared across viewers leading to a minimal increase on "origin" load.

Yes, theoretically that's the goal. Given they're showing 160GB of transfer on their servers, it doesn't seem like that's working particularly effectively. Regardless, this implementation does not demonstrate at all that IPFS would save a site from an internet hug -- just that Cloudflare can.

The JavaScript node is coming along surprisingly well. Still not 100% production ready but light enough you could doom it in the background of pages without affecting the user experience.

The addressing mechanism the sun out into IPLD is quite clever and IPFS is nearing the cusp of having a noticeable impact on the web when you consider your browser is potentially a node running in the background.

I think the main point is if Cloudflare goes down or decides they (or the government) don't like the content hosted on this site, it will still theoretically continue to work over IPFS. Probably not important for this particular blog, but it's a valuable resource for helping other people with similar setups.

My needs are pretty undemanding, but Netlify has been great for me. It’s hard to beat for both plain old HTML/JS/CSS pages as well as for generators like Hugo.

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