Web 3.0 Hosting: Onboarding Websites to the New Internet

A piece providing a straightforward means to host websites on Web3.0 for both beginners and experienced Web2.0 devs.

The aim of this discussion is to accomplish 2 things:

1.    Provide a brief intro for Web 3.0

2.    Demonstrate how to host a website using Fleek's free services

Prerequisite

The most important prerequisite to this discussion and to any discussion in the crypto space is the idea of decentralization. In an overarching sense, this means privacy and no centralized control. The internet should not be a monopolized entity, but rather a level playing space for all users.

(Cue the cypherpunk manifesto)

Web 3.0: High-Level Overview

Web 3.0 is a term that signifies peer to peer reigned data networks. Everyone who takes part in the network has unfettered access and can trust in the system. From a high level, this entails that all users can interact with others and exchange data and information without restriction.

Picture a legitimate democracy brought to the internet.

Everyone is the sole proprietor of their data and no entity or government can interfere or compromise it. These components coupled with the increase in technological capability, like the incorporation of aspects of the semantic web for instance, render its adoption to be a gradual inevitability.

What defines a user?

Anyone with a device that can connect to the internet from anywhere in the world. Any modern IoT device will fall under this umbrella.

Snapshot of Web3.0: What technology drives it?

Ethereum aspires to be the world computer. Web3.0 will be driven by Ethereum contracts, Ethereum Swarm, Ethereum whisper, plus a suite of other potential technologies such as Interplanetary File System (ipfs).

This is where we will leave the discussion for now. For a deeper dive two good sources are here, and here is an interview with Vitalik.

Fleek: Web 3.0 Hosting Service

I personally came across Fleek from a talk at a hackathon. As stated on their site, they are “Built on top of IPFS, Textile, & Filecoin, our suite of
products allow you to effortlessly take advantage of the benefits of these new technologies.”

There are three URL options:

1. Constant Hashes => serve as links within ipfs and have been discussed in my previous article.

2. DNSLink => Simply put, a regular Web2.0 domain name from a DNS record.

3. ENS => Dynamic Url with a ' .eth ' ending and that is more readable than IPNs links. I would argue that this is the best domain choice for establishing a website, but the first option is free :)

How to Host your website with Fleek on Web 3.0

NOTE: Since our focus is on hosting the website and the technical details are secondary, I have elected to quickly setup a generic site using Hugo.
The repo is here, it is a simple static site and only serves as an example.

This will be a straightforward and generic tutorial.

1. First make sure you have a repository for your website, regardless of which framework you are using. For this tutorial I have created this repo.

2. Navigate to Fleek and select their hosting. It will then prompt you to connect a repo. I elected to only authorize our repo.

3. Make sure to choose the correct build settings and then select deploy. A cool feature is that any future pushes to the master branch will trigger a redeployment automatically.

Check the deployment logs! You do not have to have a domain yet. Fleek provides us with a hash ipfs address as well as a DNS address.

It’s as simple as that to deploy to Web 3.0 and be a part of the new internet movement. We can see our links in the snapshot below.

So, the website we have just deployed can be found at both:

https://silent-shadow-1689.on.fleek.co/ (DNS Link)

& https://ipfs.fleek.co/ipfs/QmRs2Wf3EwmnvtbEMUfKN6URAy7fqMsPQhcvDDjEZ78bta (IPFS Constant Hash Link)

Greater detail for options and configurations for each front end framework can be found directly on Fleek.

Thanks for your time and I hope this was useful for you :)

~MR