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How much were you paying for your IPFS pin? E.g., if you are getting something via HTTP, there's a server somewhere with that content just waiting for you to re

How much were you paying for your IPFS pin? E.g., if you are getting something via HTTP, there's a server somewhere with that content just waiting for you to request it, typically stored on an SSD, etc. V.s. IPFS pins which are typically packed on to massive disks shared with lots of other people IDK a whole lot about IPFS though. Maybe it was the metadata resolving / DHT lookup or whatever that was super slow. BitTorrent latency was always pretty high, but it didn't matter because throughput was also high

jeroenhd 5y ago
My IPFS pin was just one or two of my servers running an IPFS daemon. Since that daemon was running on Oracle's free VPS's, the answer is probably "a small fraction of what it costs for Oracle to have you in their database". Paying for pinning sounds like something that could work but it would introduce some of the same problems that the real web suffers from back into IPFS. The idea "a web for the people, by the people" becomes problematic when you start paying people to make your content more accessible.
- zinodaur 5y ago
  if it was slow running on a dedicated vps, not super encouraging. The thing I liked about the idea of IPFS pinning is that you are paying per byte stored, v.s. per byte accessed, as long as the p2p sharing works. I.e. hosting-via-pinning a website only you read would cost the same as hosting a website that the whole internet reads.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    To be fair to the software itself, the system was never pegged for CPU usage or anything, and it wasn't a fast VPS to begin with. From what I could tell the performance issue was mostly located in the networking itself, getting the client to resolve the content on the right server. That's something that could be improved through all kinds of algorithms without breaking compatibility or functionality, so there's hope. I agree that pinning comes with some interesting ways to monetize hosting without the need for targeted advertising that the web seems to have these days. Small projects like blogs, webcomics and animations could be entirely hosted and supported by the communities around a work, while right now giant data brokers need to step in and host everything for "free".

jeroenhd 5y ago

My IPFS pin was just one or two of my servers running an IPFS daemon. Since that daemon was running on Oracle's free VPS's, the answer is probably "a small fraction of what it costs for Oracle to have you in their database". Paying for pinning sounds like something that could work but it would introduce some of the same problems that the real web suffers from back into IPFS. The idea "a web for the people, by the people" becomes problematic when you start paying people to make your content more accessible.

zinodaur 5y ago
if it was slow running on a dedicated vps, not super encouraging. The thing I liked about the idea of IPFS pinning is that you are paying per byte stored, v.s. per byte accessed, as long as the p2p sharing works. I.e. hosting-via-pinning a website only you read would cost the same as hosting a website that the whole internet reads.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  To be fair to the software itself, the system was never pegged for CPU usage or anything, and it wasn't a fast VPS to begin with. From what I could tell the performance issue was mostly located in the networking itself, getting the client to resolve the content on the right server. That's something that could be improved through all kinds of algorithms without breaking compatibility or functionality, so there's hope. I agree that pinning comes with some interesting ways to monetize hosting without the need for targeted advertising that the web seems to have these days. Small projects like blogs, webcomics and animations could be entirely hosted and supported by the communities around a work, while right now giant data brokers need to step in and host everything for "free".