7 replies to this topic

[Axel]

Will it ever be possible to host a website (Its nowadays hosted trough http) trough p2p protocols like bittorrent ?

Just wondering lol :-P

[WingedPanther]

It depends. If you want to "host" a bunch of static HTML pages, sure. If you want to host something dynamic, like this forum, it would be a lot harder.

[Roger]

Interesting idea... like P2P computing.

[fayyazlodhi]

Some very intriguing questions need to be answered before this territory could be explored.

1. Is there any real advantage? Until now, the most widespread use of P2P (bittorent, <xxx>zilla) clients etc. has been sharing pirated music, videos etc. Okay you get faster sharing opportunities because of redundant downloads. Is that the end? Is there any serious user / business advantage seen in this model?

2. Inherently we have client / server model, having entire apps running on heavy servers servicing a lot of light weight clients using browsers only. If you change a software version, all you need to do is host the latest binaries on the server if they are compatible. Imagine having to copy latest executable to every user's machine in order to upgrade.

Having said that, peer to peer computing is an active research area currently. My doubts and questions are on the real world gains for now. Though on and off we see glimpses of those for e.g. there was one research which involved sharing internet bandwidth in 3rd world countries by reverse engineering bittorent protocol.
Poor Man's Broadband: LUMS Research Featured in New Scientist : TelecomPK

[Axel]

Well if you have youtube videos or so(they can consume much bandwidth, especially the HD ones) , instead of tiring the server, all viewers share the video

[WingedPanther]

The problem with that is Google can't easily remove videos if they're distributed content.

[Guest]

It has already been done. The Freenet Project - /index

[Axel]

yes but it can somehow make it useless if its not removed ( like keys or something)