Just this week, Cloudflare, the company which provides internet services such as Content Delivery Network (CDN), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, Internet security, distributed domain name service, and other services, announced its first ever “Crypto Week“, an event to announce their new technologies, which will provide internet services, having cryptography at its core, to make its platforms on internet better.
Cloudflare has announced its Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway, a better product that lets users access Cloudflare’s decentralized storage protocol called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which was designed by Protocol Labs. Cloudflare would let the user access their content through this Gateway using HTTPS Protocol.
In a blog post, the company stressed the most consequential application of decentralization. It urged that the peer-to-peer (P2P) nature, creates redundancy of data.
If a user tries to access some application or file on a node, and even if the node goes down, the architecture would still let the user get it, comparing to just one server which might crash a whole website, it gets down.
Further, the company stated in their blog, “At the most basic level, you can access any of the billions of files stored on IPFS from your browser. But that’s not the only cool thing you can do. Using Cloudflare’s gateway, you can also build a website that’s hosted entirely on IPFS, but still available to your users at a custom domain name. Plus, we’ll issue any website connected to our gateway a free SSL certificate, ensuring that each website connected to Cloudflare’s gateway is secure from snooping and manipulation.”
Interestingly enough, although the structure is a decentralized one, the company has stated that the users can still flag harmful and abusive content or violation of privacy. The company has clarified that they will revoke their services from any platform or site with such content.