Published on: 2025-01-18
Over the last few years, I kept wondering what it might mean to host a "decentral" website very much like it is possible to decentralize certain financial services through smart contracts 1. What would be needed ?
As we will see the first and last part are fairly straight-forward. For the decentral storage I continue to have some doubts.
Normally, each website is hosted on some servers and you can access them through some domain. Currently, this website is hosted by github, which also delivers me directly the domain address. And behind Github is simply a big company which handles the domain registration for me. If I want to go decentral, I try to avoid this company and simply register the domain on a blockchain. This is already possible with ENS. This is a great start as it gets us closer to have some fancy adress like fretchen.eth. To get this I needed to set up a wallet, where Metamask seems to be the absolute standard nowadays. Once I have the wallet, I need to convert normal currency into the currency of the Blockchain, which is here Eutherum 2.
To buy the euthereum, I had to go through Kraken and then send myself the ETH into the Metamask wallet. With the ETH I could quite simply register the domain of my choice with ENS. The purchase itself is fairly straight-forward and interestingly the domain is implemented as an NFT. This is the tech that is mostly used to allow people to claim ownership for weird pictures of bored apes. Here, it basically gets you exclusive access rights to the domain, which actually sounds quite smart. The other cool thing is that ens.domains is a DAO. So there is no single authority controlling it, but a community of people. Another fairly cool feature.
This is the part where it started to get slightly non-trivial. In the centralized world we have simple no-code systems like wordpress that run on a server. All of this is not really available on decentral systes. So we need some way to fall back into static website generation very much like I do here. But once, you can host a static website on github pages, it should also be theoretically ready to host it decentrally. Given that this is clearly solved (otherwise you would not read this), it was time to try to get this onto the block-chain.
And this is now the part which was really quite annoying. At first, you think "Let me put it onto the blockchain". Well you quite quickly realize that this is totally cost-prohibitive and that you need some kind of alternative. The most famous and commonly used solution there is the IPFS. As you put a file / folder into the IPFS it gets a CID and becomes discoverable for others. But in contrast to systems like euthereum it feels quite different:
And this is also the moment at which I wrote this blog post. I could now try to pay for the pinning service, put the CID onto eth.domains and claim some decentralized website. But what did I win ?
So I am really not sure if I will go down this road any further at this stage. I keep wondering how the master himself handles the storage of his blog. But I guess I will have to keep on reading and keep waiting for helpful insights.