Topic awaiting preservation: Peer-to-peer/distributed Webhosting

According to the (german/dutch) magazine C't the free university of amsterdam is doing research for a distributed / peer-to-peer system of web hosting.

This seems an very interesting thing for home hosters who want to turn off their computer but want the website to stay online. Also this might be interesting for professinal hosters who want more reduncy.

Here is a little schematic from the working.

Normal hosting:

-Browsers sends an ip lookup to DNS server for adres of site X
-DNS server returns ip adres to browser
-Browser sends HTTP Request to Webserver of X
-Webserver returns document to browser

Distributed hosting:

-Browsers sends an ip lookup to DNS server for adres of site X
-DNS server returns ip adres to browser
-Browser sends HTTP Request to Redirector of X
-Redirector sends adres from the Master or a Replicator server to browser either which is more convenient for the browser
-The browser sends HTTP request to redirected server.
On the background the master server keeps a list with all the Replicator servers the Redirector gets his list of Replicators from the Master server. Also the Replicators are getting their documents from the master servers.

So even when the Master is down the site still can be reached and the guy behind the browsers never knews the site was down. In a more complex system all Replicators could be masters so they will send round changes made by user behind his browser. So all forum messages from X are still intact even when X itself is down.

I think this could be a very usefull technology, a simular system is already in use for a lot of download sites were you could choose manualy which mirror you want your download from. On the client side Bit-torrent users are doing something simular. With bit-torrent you can get your download from different other users and or the main site whoever has the next part off the download or is online. You do also share the packets which you had already downloaded.

For more information about distributed hosting see:
www.globule.org or
www.cs.vu.nl/cs/dist.html

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Support Justice for Pat Richard

Seems like a good place to throw this in - Magnet allows you to host downloa files and offer an option via P2P which should help cut down on bandwidth, etc.

Homepage:

www.magnetlinks.org

See also:

http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net

It integrates into most of the major P2P software e.g.:

www.kazaa.com/us/help/create_magnetlink.htm
www.grokster.com/us/help/magnet.html

Although P2P has a bad reputation at the moment things like Peercast have already shown how handy it can be and prestigious people, like Project Gutenberg, are offering a Magnet link.

[edit: And it should go without saying that I think the P2P web hosting Rinswind highlights is another exciting applicaiton of P2P.]

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Emps

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(Edited by Emperor on 11-30-2004 03:27)