6 ms·

Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a way to self-host static websites via people's own smartphones. Bandwidth costs for most sites must be tiny. The bu

by jka 6y ago

Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a way to self-host static websites via people's own smartphones. Bandwidth costs for most sites must be tiny. The business models of website/page-builder platforms are based on gathering a long tail of small businesses, and then selling the audience attention via ad networks and data mining. Looking at the ecosystem from a distance, it's creating financial value, but there are technical means to provide the same actual business value in cheaper and more privacy-preserving ways. (By "actual business value" I mean that a person can view the menu at a local cafe in their area -- a valuable interaction for both parties -- without that lookup being intermediated by a platform and N different third parties where a kind of "shadow market value" is extracted)

mxuribe 6y ago
I'm not sure if things like IPFS [0] or SecureScuttleButt [1] would be the solution (or at least partially the solution) for self-hosting websites/web content via a person's smartphones, but i like that concept. [0] = https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ [1] = https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
gruez 6y ago
That's not going to work because having a server on 24/7 is going to kill battery life. Not to mention issues around NAT and hole punching.
- jka 6y ago
  Battery usage would probably depend on how frequently requests have to be served? Discoverability and routing is certainly a question too. Something like ngrok could help there, with good network sandboxing on the user's local device. There'd no doubt be times when the site would become popular enough that a single smartphone wouldn't be suitable and load-balancing the requests could be required.
  - gruez 6y ago
    > Something like ngrok could help there, with good network sandboxing on the user's local device. ngrok only works because there's a company willing to proxy someone's traffic for free. In that sense "using ngrok" doesn't solve the issue, it only pushes the problem to someone else.
    - jka 6y ago
      It's not an ideal long-term architecture, sure. It'd be better to have website search, discovery and routing possible without routing tricks. Sometimes you have to make do with what's available currently while preparing the future possibilities.
- xenonite 6y ago
  Why makes you so sure about that? A suitable web server process uses zero CPU after it is started and opened the right port.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Phones will suspend and kill applications that aren't actively used; with iOS this has always been the case (you can't have ANYTHING running in the background on iOS unless it's navigation, calls, or music, that is you need to request special exemption from it). It might be possible on Android but even there the phone will slumber while in your pocket. Phones are not servers.
  - jannes 6y ago
    Phones turn off their radio when the screen is off and go into a sleep state (waking up in intervals). Keeping the radio on 24/7 is just going to increase power usage by a lot. It's not the CPU that's the concern. Even ignoring this issue, it would open your phone up to getting DDoSed by strangers on the internet.
    - belorn 6y ago
      How long delay does this sleep state impact messenger applications? Are we talking seconds or milliseconds?
- square_usual 6y ago
  You could have peer-to-peer hosting - you give up some space on your device to host, and if your device is offline another device has a copy of it that they serve. Of course, there would need to be some sort of regulation to ensure people weren't using it to distribute illegal material.
  - gruez 6y ago
    You'll almost certainly need some sort of cryptocurrency to adequately compensate your peers. Otherwise it's not fair for you to host someone else's 10GB movies for free while you're only publishing a 1MB static site. But if we get to that point why not just pay someone else to do it, since there will be a competitive marketplace for hosts?
    - zrm 6y ago
      Fairness is overrated. 8TB drives are currently around $150, which prices 10GB of storage under 19 cents. Bandwidth costs would dominate if one peer had to upload the same material thousands of times, but in a P2P system the average peer uploads each thing once, and then we're back to pennies. It's an amount of money smaller than its own collection cost. Do I really care if I'm paying for $0.75/year in local computing resources and only using $0.03/year myself? It's not even worth negotiating over and would generally have still existed and just been idle in the alternative. Moreover, even if everybody is a scrooge who can't just eat a negligible annual cost without worrying about it, you don't need everybody. You just need a few extra nodes to provide redundancy for you. Which could be your sister and your best friend and your father in law rather than some strangers you have to pay in a way that requires you to file weird tax paperwork.
      - gruez 6y ago
        The fundamental problem is that within a network, resource (storage, bandwidth) is scarce. There might be altruists that are willing to donate resource to the network, but there's a finite amount of them. Using a market to solves two problems: it deters abuse (eg. someone using the network as their personal backup service) and incentivizes non-altruistic people to contribute resources to the network.
zelos 6y ago
Wasn't that the plot of a season of Silicon Valley?
NortySpock 6y ago
Perhaps something like the Beaker Browser P2P website system? https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ I've run some internal-facing websites on a Raspberry Pi, also a low-cost system, but have never tried publishing them on the wider web.
superkuh 6y ago
Bandwidth costs are tiny, but phones use radios and radios cost lots of energy to handle real TCP connections that must be maintained. It'd drain the battery really fast. Plus it's a very rare telco indeed that gives your phone a real routable ipv4 address. Most are behind carrier network address translation. But the spirit is right. Just do it on a real computer at home on a landline. A static website is easy, incredibly safe (compared to, say, browsing with JS turned on), and useful.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Smartphones will not work as others have pointed out. Even convincing people to keep something running on their laptop for part of the day won't give good reliability. The only real solution is selling little boxes for less than 50 dollars that you can plug into your router and make it dead simple to host a website without any technical knowledge.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  The problem is ISPs dont provide any options for decent upload speed. I have a 200 Mbit download connection and spectrum throttles upload to 10. There are no symmetric options. Users can never win against a vertically integrated monopoly.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Yes. But that is a problem that you can work around with distributed hosting. Won't be perfect, because I think initial connection will take several seconds for every visitor, but should be faster after that.
federico_c 6y ago
The amount of unused computing and storage on personal devices is staggering. Yet HN never misses the opportunity to dogpile on anyone who points this out: data trasfer costs, battery usage, jokes about the Silicon Valley sitcom. As if most phones weren't connected to wifi and power for 10+ hours a day.
- ev1 6y ago
  Someone still needs to pay for the data transfer costs ala ngrok. I don't know of a single US mobile network that provides publicly addressable IP space, v4 or v6, it's all behind more than one layer of NAT. AT&T doesn't even allow direct internet access, every single connection goes through their horrendously bad transparent proxy that breaks TLS 1.3, breaks ESNI, causes a SSL_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG connection reset if you negotiate only modern ciphers, and sits in the middle of every connection to prevent things like obfsproxy.
reaperducer 6y ago
Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a way to self-host static websites via people's own smartphones An interesting notion, but would only work until someone's site became very popular. Then it all goes pear-shaped. And I expect that most people would want their sites to be very popular, or it wouldn't be worth their time. There's a lot of unused computing power on phones that are charging and doing nothing overnight. If only there was a way to harness that computing power and forward the results once a day or something.

by jka 6y ago

mxuribe 6y ago

I'm not sure if things like IPFS [0] or SecureScuttleButt [1] would be the solution (or at least partially the solution) for self-hosting websites/web content via a person's smartphones, but i like that concept. [0] = https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ [1] = https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/

gruez 6y ago

That's not going to work because having a server on 24/7 is going to kill battery life. Not to mention issues around NAT and hole punching.

jka 6y ago
Battery usage would probably depend on how frequently requests have to be served? Discoverability and routing is certainly a question too. Something like ngrok could help there, with good network sandboxing on the user's local device. There'd no doubt be times when the site would become popular enough that a single smartphone wouldn't be suitable and load-balancing the requests could be required.
- gruez 6y ago
  > Something like ngrok could help there, with good network sandboxing on the user's local device. ngrok only works because there's a company willing to proxy someone's traffic for free. In that sense "using ngrok" doesn't solve the issue, it only pushes the problem to someone else.
  - jka 6y ago
    It's not an ideal long-term architecture, sure. It'd be better to have website search, discovery and routing possible without routing tricks. Sometimes you have to make do with what's available currently while preparing the future possibilities.
xenonite 6y ago
Why makes you so sure about that? A suitable web server process uses zero CPU after it is started and opened the right port.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Phones will suspend and kill applications that aren't actively used; with iOS this has always been the case (you can't have ANYTHING running in the background on iOS unless it's navigation, calls, or music, that is you need to request special exemption from it). It might be possible on Android but even there the phone will slumber while in your pocket. Phones are not servers.
- jannes 6y ago
  Phones turn off their radio when the screen is off and go into a sleep state (waking up in intervals). Keeping the radio on 24/7 is just going to increase power usage by a lot. It's not the CPU that's the concern. Even ignoring this issue, it would open your phone up to getting DDoSed by strangers on the internet.
  - belorn 6y ago
    How long delay does this sleep state impact messenger applications? Are we talking seconds or milliseconds?
square_usual 6y ago
You could have peer-to-peer hosting - you give up some space on your device to host, and if your device is offline another device has a copy of it that they serve. Of course, there would need to be some sort of regulation to ensure people weren't using it to distribute illegal material.
- gruez 6y ago
  You'll almost certainly need some sort of cryptocurrency to adequately compensate your peers. Otherwise it's not fair for you to host someone else's 10GB movies for free while you're only publishing a 1MB static site. But if we get to that point why not just pay someone else to do it, since there will be a competitive marketplace for hosts?
  - zrm 6y ago
    Fairness is overrated. 8TB drives are currently around $150, which prices 10GB of storage under 19 cents. Bandwidth costs would dominate if one peer had to upload the same material thousands of times, but in a P2P system the average peer uploads each thing once, and then we're back to pennies. It's an amount of money smaller than its own collection cost. Do I really care if I'm paying for $0.75/year in local computing resources and only using $0.03/year myself? It's not even worth negotiating over and would generally have still existed and just been idle in the alternative. Moreover, even if everybody is a scrooge who can't just eat a negligible annual cost without worrying about it, you don't need everybody. You just need a few extra nodes to provide redundancy for you. Which could be your sister and your best friend and your father in law rather than some strangers you have to pay in a way that requires you to file weird tax paperwork.
    - gruez 6y ago
      The fundamental problem is that within a network, resource (storage, bandwidth) is scarce. There might be altruists that are willing to donate resource to the network, but there's a finite amount of them. Using a market to solves two problems: it deters abuse (eg. someone using the network as their personal backup service) and incentivizes non-altruistic people to contribute resources to the network.

zelos 6y ago

Wasn't that the plot of a season of Silicon Valley?

NortySpock 6y ago

Perhaps something like the Beaker Browser P2P website system? https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ I've run some internal-facing websites on a Raspberry Pi, also a low-cost system, but have never tried publishing them on the wider web.

superkuh 6y ago

Bandwidth costs are tiny, but phones use radios and radios cost lots of energy to handle real TCP connections that must be maintained. It'd drain the battery really fast. Plus it's a very rare telco indeed that gives your phone a real routable ipv4 address. Most are behind carrier network address translation. But the spirit is right. Just do it on a real computer at home on a landline. A static website is easy, incredibly safe (compared to, say, browsing with JS turned on), and useful.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

Smartphones will not work as others have pointed out. Even convincing people to keep something running on their laptop for part of the day won't give good reliability. The only real solution is selling little boxes for less than 50 dollars that you can plug into your router and make it dead simple to host a website without any technical knowledge.

yummypaint 6y ago
The problem is ISPs dont provide any options for decent upload speed. I have a 200 Mbit download connection and spectrum throttles upload to 10. There are no symmetric options. Users can never win against a vertically integrated monopoly.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Yes. But that is a problem that you can work around with distributed hosting. Won't be perfect, because I think initial connection will take several seconds for every visitor, but should be faster after that.

federico_c 6y ago

The amount of unused computing and storage on personal devices is staggering. Yet HN never misses the opportunity to dogpile on anyone who points this out: data trasfer costs, battery usage, jokes about the Silicon Valley sitcom. As if most phones weren't connected to wifi and power for 10+ hours a day.

ev1 6y ago
Someone still needs to pay for the data transfer costs ala ngrok. I don't know of a single US mobile network that provides publicly addressable IP space, v4 or v6, it's all behind more than one layer of NAT. AT&T doesn't even allow direct internet access, every single connection goes through their horrendously bad transparent proxy that breaks TLS 1.3, breaks ESNI, causes a SSL_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG connection reset if you negotiate only modern ciphers, and sits in the middle of every connection to prevent things like obfsproxy.

reaperducer 6y ago

Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a way to self-host static websites via people's own smartphones An interesting notion, but would only work until someone's site became very popular. Then it all goes pear-shaped. And I expect that most people would want their sites to be very popular, or it wouldn't be worth their time. There's a lot of unused computing power on phones that are charging and doing nothing overnight. If only there was a way to harness that computing power and forward the results once a day or something.