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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how many Ipfs nodes have actually pinned your content? Have they done so purely because they are ipfs enthusiasts? Do you feel this solution is better than hosting it on a raspberry pi from home or on a cheap VPS?

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There's a misunderstanding here. IPFS' content addressing exists to serve the interests of people who might want to save someone else's content, and of people who might want to find and access content which others have saved, much more than the interests of people who want to upload their own content and wouldn't mind a freebie. (That said, it does does also have advantages for uploaders who don't want to administer an Internet-facing Linux box and don't want to fiddle with DNS to move web hosts.)

That doesn’t seem like a misunderstanding as much as the person you’re replying to has a deeper understanding of how the whole system works. That seems important to ask because as far as I can tell the person they were trying to was under the impression that it provides free hosting.

I don't have a place that I own or rent that's called home. I am living as an undocumented refugee, somewhere in Europe. Sorry, I can't rely on physical storage of information (except mobile/portable devices). The place in which I live at is not on the list of what I can control. That's mainly decided by government(s) or my social network members a.k.a friends.

I have no idea of who or what pinned the ipfs content. I really don't gather those statistics and have never tried to do so. The only "metric" which grabs my attention is that the content is widely distributed and that its reliably accessible via more than one way (not depend on a single point of failure) over large-scale electronic networks/protocols (HTTPS, DNS, IPFS, ETH, ENS..).

Why not both? Hosting content on a paid IPFS gateway is cheaper than any VPS ever will because of the enthusiasts, and if you still don't trust it enough you can have your own raspberry pi hosting/pinning your own files.

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