A Decentralized Solution for Web Hosting

This paper proposes a decentralized solution for web hosting based on interplanetary file system (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain. Particularly, we use Ethereum smart contracts to manage the IPFS network and the web hosting service. IPFS platform is used to store data and to host websites. All storage miner nodes on the IPFS network offer the pinning service to ensure that source codes of the websites and users' data are retained long-term. Moreover, these nodes also enable the interplanetary name space (IPNS) service for creating and updating mutable links to IPFS contents. TXT record is also used in the domain name system (DNS) to map domain names to IPNS addresses for hosted websites. For privacy-preserving data storage, websites need to be deployed an encryption algorithm. The proposed model that combines between the IPFS and blockchain networks to form a platform providing the decentralized web hosting service. Experiment illustrates building and hosting a web application on the IPFS network. Experimental results show that, compared to the traditional web hosting model, the hosted web application on the proposed platform ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability.