Why is p2p web hosting not widely used? [closed]

Solution 1:

This is what Freenet basically is,

Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

[...]

Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

The biggest problem is that it's slow. Both in transfer speed and (mainly) latency.. Even if you can get lots of people with decent upload throughput, it'll still never be as quick a dedicated servers or two.. The speed is fine for what Freenet is (publishing data without fear of censorship), but not for hosting your website..

A bigger problem is the content has to be static files, which rules out it's use for a majority of high-traffic websites.. To serve dynamic data each peer would have to execute code (scary), and would probably have to retrieve data from a database (which would be another big delay, again because of the latency)

I think "cloud computing" is about as close to P2P web-hosting as we'll see for the time being..

Solution 2:

P2P website hosting is not yet widely used, because the companion technology allowing higher upstream rates for individual clients is not yet widely used, and this is something I want to look into*.

What is needed for this is called Wireless Mesh Networking, which should allow the average user to utilise the full upstream speed that their router is capable of, rather than just whatever some profiteering ISP rations out to them, while they relay information between other routers so that it eventually reaches its target.

In order to host a website P2P, a sort of combination of technology is required between wireless mesh communication, multiple-redundancy RAID storage, torrent sharing, and some kind of encryption key hierarchy that allows various users different abilities to change the data that is being transmitted, allowing something dynamic such as a forum to be hosted. The system would have to be self-updating to incorporate the latter, probably by time-stamping all distributed data packets.

There may be other possible catalysts that would cause the widespread use of p2p hosting, but I think anything that returns the physical architecture of hardware actually wiring up the internet back to its original theory of web communication is a good candidate.

Of course as always, the main reason this has not been implemented yet is because there is little or no money in it. The idea will be picked up much faster if either:

1. Someone finds a way to largely corrupt it towards consumerism

2. Router manufacturers realise there is a large demand for WiMesh-ready routers

3. There is a global paradigm shift away from the profit motive and towards creating things only to benefit all of humanity by creating abundance and striving for optimum efficiency

*see p2pint dot darkbb dot com if you're interested in developing this concept