[fosh]

How do hosting providers fit in here, if at all? E.g., if I want to host a website on IPFS, do I publish it from my own machine and then wait a healthy amount of time for the content to be absorbed by the ether, or is there some way I can encourage other nodes to pick it up without requiring end-users to actively seek out my fresh material?

[microtonal]

It seems that the role of a hosting provider could be: I pay you <amount> per month to fetch <hash> or <name> on <N> peers with bandwidth <bandwidth>.

Of course, the economics are quite different. In the normal web, you need to add more resources when a page becomes more popular. In a distributed web, more resources are a side-effect of a page becoming more popular.

[viraptor]

There's http://filecoin.io - still waiting to be started. It's connected to the ipfs project.

[diggan]

So if you add a file to IPFS, it's not gonna be automatically picked up by the network. Only people who request it, will have the file.

In the future, there will be hosting providers that allows you to upload a file to their IPFS "cloud" either as free hosting or paying for it, just as today. It'll just be easier for everyone to pass around a hash of the file rather than the file itself.

Maybe there will even be an API that you can hook up into your application, so content will be seeded that way.