What Is Decentralized Web Hosting? How Peer-to-Peer Websites Work
Decentralized web hosting means putting your website into the hands of a global peer-to-peer network instead of parking it on a single corporate server. You’ve probably heard names thrown around, IPFS, ENS, Filecoin, and thought, “Wait, isn’t that just ‘crypto versions of Dropbox’?” No, and the difference matters.
At the heart of decentralized hosting is one radical truth: You don’t need a middleman to put content on the web anymore. That includes cloud providers, domain registrars, or institutions that “manage” content. It’s about censorship resistance, uptime you can’t DDoS, and websites that don’t disappear when their funding dries up. If you’re a builder, journalist, DAO, or just sick of pay-to-play platforms, you should care.
So, what are the real mechanics behind peer-to-peer websites, and are these systems actually usable today?
Why This Matters for You:
✅ No single points of failure. No AWS account, no DNS registry, no kill switch.
✅ Sites become censorship-resistant by design, not by permission.
✅ You own your content and domain keys, making your presence on the web verifiable and portable.
🤔 Performance still lags behind centralized setups; “trustless” doesn’t mean lightning-fast.
🤔 Regulation is murky, and content moderation is nonexistent; great for free speech, bad for liability.
The Actual Facts: What Is Decentralized Web Hosting?
Traditional web hosting typically involves spinning up a server (either physical or cloud-based), installing the necessary software, and then connecting a domain name via DNS. All your traffic is directed to that server. Great, until that server gets slashed by a regulator, hacked, or breaks under high load. You go dark.
Decentralized web hosting flips that script. Instead of one point of failure, your site’s files are scattered across hundreds, maybe thousands, of independent nodes. These nodes can be laptops in Lisbon, hobbyist servers in Hanoi, or industrial clusters in Iceland. If one goes offline, your content lives on.
Usually, this content is stored using something like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a protocol that splits your website into chunks and gives each chunk a unique cryptographic hash. Think of it like BitTorrent, but for entire site infrastructures, not just movie files.
Ownership and addressing also work differently. Web3 domains like those from the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) replace traditional DNS. Instead of .com or .org, you might host at yourname.eth or yourproject.dao. These records live on smart contracts, not registrars.
The stack is global, redundant, and persistent, not just distributed, but trustless and verifiable.
Hosting Without a Master: The Architectural Shift
The clearest way to understand decentralized hosting is to compare it with torrenting, except now you’re serving websites, not files, and you don’t need to rely on a tracker. If your site is pinned to IPFS, and let’s say, three or four willing nodes keep copies of your files, they serve any user who asks for it.
Need to update your page? You update the content, and its hash changes. Then you update your ENS record to point to that new hash. Smart contracts record these updates immutably.
Traditional hosting models are like monolithic skyscrapers. Strong until compromised. Decentralized networks are fungal, alive, rhizomatic, and near-impossible to uproot. If one node is chopped down, the rest compensate.
Censorship Resistance ≠ Buzzword
In 2022, governments took down news outlets, activist groups were deplatformed, and multiple crypto protocols watched their frontends go black after DNS seizures or server disruptions. Hosting on a peer-to-peer network limits this threat, not with better permissions, but by removing choke points entirely.
When your domain lives on ENS and your content lives on Filecoin or Arweave, there’s no AWS account to subpoena, no registrar to pressure.
And it’s not just about speech. If you’re building decentralized finance, DAOs, or token-gated communities, you have to ask: What happens if your frontend goes down for 48 hours? Now multiply that by a million users’ funds. That’s not a risk, it’s a built-in exit scam vector if you’re not decentralized.
Of course, there’s no such thing as perfect uptime. However, peer-to-peer networks have demonstrated remarkably robust durability over time. Popular IPFS content, like the ConstitutionDAO documents, have been served for years, unchanged, unlost, and unowned.
It’s Not All Poetry and Protocols: Tradeoffs and Truths
Peer-to-peer doesn’t mean problem-free.
First, performance. IPFS file retrieval times are slower than traditional CDNs. You can mitigate this with “pinning” providers (think of them like decentralized CDNs), but it adds cost and complexity.
Second, permanence. Arweave offers perma-storage, where you pay once and files persist forever, conceptually. In practice, the economic assumptions rely on token models. If those fail, your data might, too. You’re trading centralized failures for decentralized game theory. Transparent, sure. But still risky.
Third, law. Hosting systems that no one controls are also systems no one moderates. That means they’re regulatory minefields globally. Uploading illegal content to IPFS doesn’t just get your site delisted, it gets your entire node poisoned. Legal clarity is murky, with no unified frameworks yet.
Hybrid approaches are emerging. Coinbase stores NFT metadata on both IPFS and standard CDNs. Some DeFi interfaces load static fallback content from centralized sources in case their IPFS domains are unreachable. Redundancy isn’t just smart; it’s necessary, for now.
How does decentralized web hosting handle downtime or service disruptions?
Decentralized web hosting resists downtime by design, distributing content across a network of independent nodes instead of relying on a single server. If one node goes offline, others still serve the content, making service disruptions unlikely as long as the content is popular or well-pinned.
Networks like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) store hashed versions of website data across participating nodes. These nodes act as mirrors. File persistence depends on pinning strategies, where either the website owner or third-party services pay or incentivize others to host the content. So long as at least one copy remains accessible in the network, users can retrieve it.
However, low-traffic or poorly pinned content may face degradation or become slow to access. That’s why hybrid models often use decentralized storage with fallback gateways or redundancy layers to keep uptime predictable. Hosting without centralized servers isn’t magic, it just spreads the risk.
What are the key differences between IPFS and blockchain-based web hosting solutions?
IPFS focuses on decentralized file storage and transmission, while blockchain-based web hosting leans into storing logic, ownership records, or pointers to data directly on-chain. The main difference is where and how your data lives.
Think of it this way...
Imagine IPFS as your cloud hard drive, but spread across the globe. It stores files off-chain using content-addressing, meaning files are fetched by their cryptographic hash, not a web address. In contrast, blockchain hosting solutions embed parts of the site or interactions into smart contracts or block data, often more expensive and slower due to block size limits.
For example, Arweave uses a blockchain-like system optimized for permanent data storage, whereas Ethereum-based dApps might only store the site’s logic on-chain, pointing to IPFS for images or UI.
In short: IPFS decouples websites from centralized servers; blockchains verify and formalize interactions. They often work together, IPFS stores the data, blockchains manage access or updates.
Can decentralized hosting support interactive web apps and real-time features?
Yes, but with trade-offs. Decentralized hosting can support interactive web apps, but real-time features like live chat, updates, or multiplayer syncing usually require off-chain or hybrid solutions.
Decentralized networks serve static content well, think HTML, CSS, JavaScript. But dynamic interactions, especially those requiring state changes or fast reads/writes, often rely on APIs, WebSocket servers, or sidechains for responsiveness.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like building with LEGO: decentralized hosting gives you the building blocks, but for moving parts, you need extra mechanics. Projects often use IPFS for front-end files, while real-time actions run through centralized services, distributed compute (like Livepeer), or protocols like GunDB and OrbitDB for peer-to-peer updates.
Fully decentralized interactivity remains a challenge because latency, cost, and consensus mechanisms don’t play nicely with the instant-update culture of modern web apps. But for many use cases, blogs, dashboards, NFTs, DAOs, the hybrid model works well.
How do content creators manage copyright and ownership on decentralized hosting platforms?
On decentralized platforms, content creators manage ownership by linking their identity and content to cryptographic keys or blockchain records. Copyright still exists, it’s just tracked differently.
Instead of hosting content on a server you rent from a company, you publish it from your wallet address. You can timestamp your work, sign it digitally, and anchor authorship to the blockchain. These signals act as proof-of-creation, and networks like Arweave or NFT platforms help preserve this metadata permanently.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like watermarking a digital painting, but the watermark is your wallet address, and the world can verify it without trusting a middleman.
That said, enforcing copyright remains tricky. Just because a system is decentralized doesn’t mean it’s free-for-all. There’s no central takedown point, so disputes must go through social, legal, or DAO-style governance channels. Ownership is clearer; enforcement, less so.
What role does Web3 authentication play in securing decentralized websites?
Web3 authentication verifies users through wallets instead of usernames and passwords, enabling secure, native access control on decentralized sites. It replaces login forms with cryptographic signatures.
Think of it this way...
It’s like showing your passport at a club entrance, but instead of a bouncer, a smart contract checks your credentials.
This matters in decentralized hosting because there’s no centralized server managing sessions or logins. Web3 authentication lets you restrict access, enable user interactions, and tie data or assets to specific wallet IDs. Projects like Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Sign-In with Ethereum are examples of how seamless this can get.
It also boosts resilience. Since credentials aren’t stored on a server, there’s nothing to hack or leak. Users keep control of their identity, and what they share, with every login.
Is SEO impacted when migrating a website to a decentralized hosting model?
Yes, but it’s manageable. Search engines can index decentralized sites, but you have to play by their rules: accessible URLs, readable content, and solid metadata.
The biggest hurdle is that IPFS and other peer-to-peer website hosting systems use content-addressed hashes in URLs, which change when files change. That’s bad news for SEO unless you layer human-readable gateways (like .eth or .xyz domains) that point to your IPFS content.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like giving your website a nickname. Google can’t remember “Qmd93ajx…” but it can index “mywebsite.eth.link.”
Using ENS, DNSLink, or tools like Fleek ensures continuity and crawlability. But other SEO factors like page load speed and mobile optimization still apply. Decentralized hosting doesn’t erase SEO best practices, it just adds a few steps to make your site discoverable.
How do nodes get incentivized to host content in decentralized web infrastructure?
Nodes are incentivized through token rewards, staking mechanisms, or direct payments to persist and serve content. The more reliably a node stores or delivers data, the more it can earn.
Think of it this way...
Think of nodes like Airbnb hosts, you pay them (in Filecoin, Arweave tokens, etc.) to store your stuff, and price varies by speed, bandwidth, or region.
In Filecoin, for example, miners get paid for providing storage and retrieval services, secured through cryptographic proofs. In IPFS, nodes typically host content voluntarily or use third-party pinning services (like Pinata) to ensure persistence, often wrapped into gateways or platforms.
This decentralized incentive model means content doesn’t just live in a single server warehouse. It spreads out and incentivizes reliability through economics, not contracts.
What are the legal challenges of hosting sensitive content on a decentralized network?
The main legal challenge is accountability. Since decentralized hosting uses a distributed network without a central operator, determining who “owns” or controls hosted content gets murky, especially for illegal, copyrighted, or harmful material.
Think of it this way...
Imagine mailing a banned book to a thousand strangers. No one person owns it, but it’s everywhere.
Jurisdictions vary widely on what’s considered illegal, and decentralized networks don’t stop at borders. That makes enforcement tough, especially since content uploads may be permanent (as in Arweave) or mirrored across nodes without centralized moderation. Governments and legal entities have begun testing strategies, but liability remains a gray zone.
Some networks adopt community moderation, DAO governance, or opt-in filters. But if you’re deploying sensitive or high-risk data, you need to understand your target region’s laws, and know that “decentralized” doesn’t mean “immune.”
How does decentralized hosting support censorship resistance in restricted regions?
Decentralized hosting resists censorship by removing the chokepoints. There’s no single server or domain registrar to pressure, and content is mirrored across nodes run by people around the world.
Networks like IPFS and Arweave make content retrievable as long as any node still holds it. Even if one gateway is blocked (e.g., in a censored country), users can access the same content through another node or use a VPN to fetch it. Tools like ENS and blockchain-based domains further protect from DNS-based censorship.
Iran, China, and Russia have tried to block IPFS gateways, but decentralized hosting makes takedowns a game of digital whack-a-mole. While not foolproof, it greatly raises the cost and complexity of censorship, giving journalists, activists, and developers more breathing room.
Final Thoughts: Why Decentralized Web Hosting Matters
Data shouldn’t disappear when a startup fails. Speech shouldn’t vanish because a DNS host got cold feet. And you shouldn’t need a multi-billion-dollar provider to serve a CSS file.
Decentralized hosting is about building websites the way we build DeFi: trustless, composable, and global from the start. For builders, it’s a new architecture. For users, it’s a new expectation. For sysadmins, it’s a new problem set, deservedly so.
It’s not for everyone. If you’re bootstrapping a meme site or hosting real-time multiplayer games, traditional clouds are faster and easier, no shame. But for anyone publishing critical content, stewarding digital communities, or building infrastructure worth defending, decentralized web hosting can mean the difference between being deleted or being undeniable.
Decentralized web hosting means putting your website into the hands of a global peer-to-peer network instead of parking it on a single corporate server. You’ve probably heard names thrown around, IPFS, ENS, Filecoin, and thought, “Wait, isn’t that just ‘crypto versions of Dropbox’?” No, and the difference matters.
At the heart of decentralized hosting is one radical truth: You don’t need a middleman to put content on the web anymore. That includes cloud providers, domain registrars, or institutions that “manage” content. It’s about censorship resistance, uptime you can’t DDoS, and websites that don’t disappear when their funding dries up. If you’re a builder, journalist, DAO, or just sick of pay-to-play platforms, you should care.
So, what are the real mechanics behind peer-to-peer websites, and are these systems actually usable today?
Why This Matters for You:
✅ No single points of failure. No AWS account, no DNS registry, no kill switch.
✅ Sites become censorship-resistant by design, not by permission.
✅ You own your content and domain keys, making your presence on the web verifiable and portable.
🤔 Performance still lags behind centralized setups; “trustless” doesn’t mean lightning-fast.
🤔 Regulation is murky, and content moderation is nonexistent; great for free speech, bad for liability.
The Actual Facts: What Is Decentralized Web Hosting?
Traditional web hosting typically involves spinning up a server (either physical or cloud-based), installing the necessary software, and then connecting a domain name via DNS. All your traffic is directed to that server. Great, until that server gets slashed by a regulator, hacked, or breaks under high load. You go dark.
Decentralized web hosting flips that script. Instead of one point of failure, your site’s files are scattered across hundreds, maybe thousands, of independent nodes. These nodes can be laptops in Lisbon, hobbyist servers in Hanoi, or industrial clusters in Iceland. If one goes offline, your content lives on.
Usually, this content is stored using something like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a protocol that splits your website into chunks and gives each chunk a unique cryptographic hash. Think of it like BitTorrent, but for entire site infrastructures, not just movie files.
Ownership and addressing also work differently. Web3 domains like those from the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) replace traditional DNS. Instead of .com or .org, you might host at yourname.eth or yourproject.dao. These records live on smart contracts, not registrars.
The stack is global, redundant, and persistent, not just distributed, but trustless and verifiable.
Hosting Without a Master: The Architectural Shift
The clearest way to understand decentralized hosting is to compare it with torrenting, except now you’re serving websites, not files, and you don’t need to rely on a tracker. If your site is pinned to IPFS, and let’s say, three or four willing nodes keep copies of your files, they serve any user who asks for it.
Need to update your page? You update the content, and its hash changes. Then you update your ENS record to point to that new hash. Smart contracts record these updates immutably.
Traditional hosting models are like monolithic skyscrapers. Strong until compromised. Decentralized networks are fungal, alive, rhizomatic, and near-impossible to uproot. If one node is chopped down, the rest compensate.
Censorship Resistance ≠ Buzzword
In 2022, governments took down news outlets, activist groups were deplatformed, and multiple crypto protocols watched their frontends go black after DNS seizures or server disruptions. Hosting on a peer-to-peer network limits this threat, not with better permissions, but by removing choke points entirely.
When your domain lives on ENS and your content lives on Filecoin or Arweave, there’s no AWS account to subpoena, no registrar to pressure.
And it’s not just about speech. If you’re building decentralized finance, DAOs, or token-gated communities, you have to ask: What happens if your frontend goes down for 48 hours? Now multiply that by a million users’ funds. That’s not a risk, it’s a built-in exit scam vector if you’re not decentralized.
Of course, there’s no such thing as perfect uptime. However, peer-to-peer networks have demonstrated remarkably robust durability over time. Popular IPFS content, like the ConstitutionDAO documents, have been served for years, unchanged, unlost, and unowned.
It’s Not All Poetry and Protocols: Tradeoffs and Truths
Peer-to-peer doesn’t mean problem-free.
First, performance. IPFS file retrieval times are slower than traditional CDNs. You can mitigate this with “pinning” providers (think of them like decentralized CDNs), but it adds cost and complexity.
Second, permanence. Arweave offers perma-storage, where you pay once and files persist forever, conceptually. In practice, the economic assumptions rely on token models. If those fail, your data might, too. You’re trading centralized failures for decentralized game theory. Transparent, sure. But still risky.
Third, law. Hosting systems that no one controls are also systems no one moderates. That means they’re regulatory minefields globally. Uploading illegal content to IPFS doesn’t just get your site delisted, it gets your entire node poisoned. Legal clarity is murky, with no unified frameworks yet.
Hybrid approaches are emerging. Coinbase stores NFT metadata on both IPFS and standard CDNs. Some DeFi interfaces load static fallback content from centralized sources in case their IPFS domains are unreachable. Redundancy isn’t just smart; it’s necessary, for now.
How does decentralized web hosting handle downtime or service disruptions?
Decentralized web hosting resists downtime by design, distributing content across a network of independent nodes instead of relying on a single server. If one node goes offline, others still serve the content, making service disruptions unlikely as long as the content is popular or well-pinned.
Networks like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) store hashed versions of website data across participating nodes. These nodes act as mirrors. File persistence depends on pinning strategies, where either the website owner or third-party services pay or incentivize others to host the content. So long as at least one copy remains accessible in the network, users can retrieve it.
However, low-traffic or poorly pinned content may face degradation or become slow to access. That’s why hybrid models often use decentralized storage with fallback gateways or redundancy layers to keep uptime predictable. Hosting without centralized servers isn’t magic, it just spreads the risk.
What are the key differences between IPFS and blockchain-based web hosting solutions?
IPFS focuses on decentralized file storage and transmission, while blockchain-based web hosting leans into storing logic, ownership records, or pointers to data directly on-chain. The main difference is where and how your data lives.
Think of it this way...
Imagine IPFS as your cloud hard drive, but spread across the globe. It stores files off-chain using content-addressing, meaning files are fetched by their cryptographic hash, not a web address. In contrast, blockchain hosting solutions embed parts of the site or interactions into smart contracts or block data, often more expensive and slower due to block size limits.
For example, Arweave uses a blockchain-like system optimized for permanent data storage, whereas Ethereum-based dApps might only store the site’s logic on-chain, pointing to IPFS for images or UI.
In short: IPFS decouples websites from centralized servers; blockchains verify and formalize interactions. They often work together, IPFS stores the data, blockchains manage access or updates.
Can decentralized hosting support interactive web apps and real-time features?
Yes, but with trade-offs. Decentralized hosting can support interactive web apps, but real-time features like live chat, updates, or multiplayer syncing usually require off-chain or hybrid solutions.
Decentralized networks serve static content well, think HTML, CSS, JavaScript. But dynamic interactions, especially those requiring state changes or fast reads/writes, often rely on APIs, WebSocket servers, or sidechains for responsiveness.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like building with LEGO: decentralized hosting gives you the building blocks, but for moving parts, you need extra mechanics. Projects often use IPFS for front-end files, while real-time actions run through centralized services, distributed compute (like Livepeer), or protocols like GunDB and OrbitDB for peer-to-peer updates.
Fully decentralized interactivity remains a challenge because latency, cost, and consensus mechanisms don’t play nicely with the instant-update culture of modern web apps. But for many use cases, blogs, dashboards, NFTs, DAOs, the hybrid model works well.
How do content creators manage copyright and ownership on decentralized hosting platforms?
On decentralized platforms, content creators manage ownership by linking their identity and content to cryptographic keys or blockchain records. Copyright still exists, it’s just tracked differently.
Instead of hosting content on a server you rent from a company, you publish it from your wallet address. You can timestamp your work, sign it digitally, and anchor authorship to the blockchain. These signals act as proof-of-creation, and networks like Arweave or NFT platforms help preserve this metadata permanently.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like watermarking a digital painting, but the watermark is your wallet address, and the world can verify it without trusting a middleman.
That said, enforcing copyright remains tricky. Just because a system is decentralized doesn’t mean it’s free-for-all. There’s no central takedown point, so disputes must go through social, legal, or DAO-style governance channels. Ownership is clearer; enforcement, less so.
What role does Web3 authentication play in securing decentralized websites?
Web3 authentication verifies users through wallets instead of usernames and passwords, enabling secure, native access control on decentralized sites. It replaces login forms with cryptographic signatures.
Think of it this way...
It’s like showing your passport at a club entrance, but instead of a bouncer, a smart contract checks your credentials.
This matters in decentralized hosting because there’s no centralized server managing sessions or logins. Web3 authentication lets you restrict access, enable user interactions, and tie data or assets to specific wallet IDs. Projects like Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Sign-In with Ethereum are examples of how seamless this can get.
It also boosts resilience. Since credentials aren’t stored on a server, there’s nothing to hack or leak. Users keep control of their identity, and what they share, with every login.
Is SEO impacted when migrating a website to a decentralized hosting model?
Yes, but it’s manageable. Search engines can index decentralized sites, but you have to play by their rules: accessible URLs, readable content, and solid metadata.
The biggest hurdle is that IPFS and other peer-to-peer website hosting systems use content-addressed hashes in URLs, which change when files change. That’s bad news for SEO unless you layer human-readable gateways (like .eth or .xyz domains) that point to your IPFS content.
Think of it this way...
Think of it like giving your website a nickname. Google can’t remember “Qmd93ajx…” but it can index “mywebsite.eth.link.”
Using ENS, DNSLink, or tools like Fleek ensures continuity and crawlability. But other SEO factors like page load speed and mobile optimization still apply. Decentralized hosting doesn’t erase SEO best practices, it just adds a few steps to make your site discoverable.
How do nodes get incentivized to host content in decentralized web infrastructure?
Nodes are incentivized through token rewards, staking mechanisms, or direct payments to persist and serve content. The more reliably a node stores or delivers data, the more it can earn.
Think of it this way...
Think of nodes like Airbnb hosts, you pay them (in Filecoin, Arweave tokens, etc.) to store your stuff, and price varies by speed, bandwidth, or region.
In Filecoin, for example, miners get paid for providing storage and retrieval services, secured through cryptographic proofs. In IPFS, nodes typically host content voluntarily or use third-party pinning services (like Pinata) to ensure persistence, often wrapped into gateways or platforms.
This decentralized incentive model means content doesn’t just live in a single server warehouse. It spreads out and incentivizes reliability through economics, not contracts.
What are the legal challenges of hosting sensitive content on a decentralized network?
The main legal challenge is accountability. Since decentralized hosting uses a distributed network without a central operator, determining who “owns” or controls hosted content gets murky, especially for illegal, copyrighted, or harmful material.
Think of it this way...
Imagine mailing a banned book to a thousand strangers. No one person owns it, but it’s everywhere.
Jurisdictions vary widely on what’s considered illegal, and decentralized networks don’t stop at borders. That makes enforcement tough, especially since content uploads may be permanent (as in Arweave) or mirrored across nodes without centralized moderation. Governments and legal entities have begun testing strategies, but liability remains a gray zone.
Some networks adopt community moderation, DAO governance, or opt-in filters. But if you’re deploying sensitive or high-risk data, you need to understand your target region’s laws, and know that “decentralized” doesn’t mean “immune.”
How does decentralized hosting support censorship resistance in restricted regions?
Decentralized hosting resists censorship by removing the chokepoints. There’s no single server or domain registrar to pressure, and content is mirrored across nodes run by people around the world.
Networks like IPFS and Arweave make content retrievable as long as any node still holds it. Even if one gateway is blocked (e.g., in a censored country), users can access the same content through another node or use a VPN to fetch it. Tools like ENS and blockchain-based domains further protect from DNS-based censorship.
Iran, China, and Russia have tried to block IPFS gateways, but decentralized hosting makes takedowns a game of digital whack-a-mole. While not foolproof, it greatly raises the cost and complexity of censorship, giving journalists, activists, and developers more breathing room.
Final Thoughts: Why Decentralized Web Hosting Matters
Data shouldn’t disappear when a startup fails. Speech shouldn’t vanish because a DNS host got cold feet. And you shouldn’t need a multi-billion-dollar provider to serve a CSS file.
Decentralized hosting is about building websites the way we build DeFi: trustless, composable, and global from the start. For builders, it’s a new architecture. For users, it’s a new expectation. For sysadmins, it’s a new problem set, deservedly so.
It’s not for everyone. If you’re bootstrapping a meme site or hosting real-time multiplayer games, traditional clouds are faster and easier, no shame. But for anyone publishing critical content, stewarding digital communities, or building infrastructure worth defending, decentralized web hosting can mean the difference between being deleted or being undeniable.