98% of our technology is off-chain. Only a little tiny sliver (the file contract open and close) is actually posted to the blockchain.
Wait, is that a typo?? That seems incredibly generous. I guess that's where decentralization comes in.
Does it also mean that if for some reason the network comes down, the files all come down as well?
I'm writing a more direct comparison this week, we just recently (less than 30 days ago) hit full feature parity with ipfs, any webapp or file deployed on IPFS should work natively on Skynet now as well. The link/identifier will be different but you shouldn't need to change any code
The main reason we chose a host-based architecture instead of a pin based architecture is that we saw on IPFS that having people pin their own data resulted in really poor uptimes, a lot of file rot, and it also substantially reduced scalability and increased fetch times. And after all of those tradeoffs, the vast majority of accessible content on IPFS is hosted via a pinning service anyway.
(It sounds like it, but) to clarify, can you do this completely for free, with no cooperation from a third party (eg, you don't need to pay a existing host to vouch for you)?
If the files are cached and the services are up, it's plenty fast for static data but dynamic data (IPNS) is still very slow.
We've built a competitor called Skynet that is much faster (less than 200ms for files that aren't in the cache) and scales better. It's currently hosting tens of millions of files across 200+ TB of data.
We really like the vision that IPFS had and we think decentralized data is the future of the Internet. We're proud to have put in the legwork to make it practical.
https://docs.siasky.net/