
Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network - Geee
https://blog.sia.tech/meet-sia-the-most-viable-non-financial-application-of-blockchain-technology-afe6e7412a25
======
jchw
> Today it is possible to purchase a refurbished 1 TB hard drive for about $20
> — so buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the
> hard drives used to store their data!

What a refurbished hard disk does not give you:

\- Redundant storage

\- Redundant power/network/etc.

\- Geographic distribution

\- A network API

\- _Any_ networking, or uplinks at all

\- Access control

\- A team ensuring the reliability and security of your data

\- Global network of datacenters and pops

\- Integration with other cloud services

All that and Amazon et al. do not store your 1TB of data in a single
refurbished hard disk. This is beyond non-sense.

Sure, some of these costs are amortized, but I still think this is a lame
comparison. If all you wanted was at-cost block storage with crappy
reliability and speed, you could probably accomplish that in easier ways.

~~~
weq
I think the use-case of cloud storage is mostly marketing by cloud provides to
show relevance to the consumer. They are are loss leaders at best; used to
lock you in to their services / track your every move; at worst.

I think the comparison with a $20 1TB hdd is perfect. Cloud providers, and
phone makers, have convinced you to have your photos, music, data, online,
always. Like a bank. Among other things, its much easier to mine your usage
patterns that way and enforce DRM of other cloud services.

I have my IDE PC drive from 20 years ago. It still works. I can burn a CD if
im that worried about failure. I dont need the redundancy of a billion user
website, a networking api, access control, all that other crap you use in
enterprises that comply with ISO standards.

Before cloud providers, people didnt take their photos to Apple and tell them
to store them. The only reason u do it now, is because of marketing and
service integration.

~~~
jtbayly
Wrong. The reason we do now is so that we can have our photo library
accessible on our phones and synced between multiple devices.

------
buildbuildbuild
Abuse concerns and “does it need a blockchain” cynicism aside I find all of
these “crypto” cloud computing projects fascinating. I highly recommend
playing around on their testnets. Storj and Filecoin are also competing in the
storage space, and BitTorrent is vying to be a CDN alternative.

SONM aims to be an EC2 competitor, and interestingly requires ID verification
to participate in their testnet due to the clear abuse potential of
unattributable internet-connected VMs. (which exist in plenty of other places
anyways since at present date, hosting providers have no KYC requirements)

Will the sharing economy extend to computing resources? I’ll stay tuned.

~~~
Taek
Decentralized computing is a challenge because unlike storage, it's very
expensive to encrypt computation. You see something like 10,000x slowdowns.

With storage, we can encrypt and checksum everything client-side in a
cryptographically secure manner, and we can have full faith that even though
we are giving our data to someone else, they have no way to view the data or
tamper with the data.

If techniques like homomorphic encryption gain substantial speedups, I'm sure
that we'll start to see decentralized/trustless computing, but for now you
really need to be doing your outsourced computing with someone you can trust
and someone who is regulated, because it's possible to act maliciously.

~~~
fghtr
[https://golem.network](https://golem.network) is the project to make
decentralized computing possible. They already have beta version released.

~~~
bin0
This still leaves problems:

1\. Now I have to trust two providers, each of which could have problems.

2\. Now I have to pay for encryption, _then_ pay for storage, and probably
have higher ingress costs, too (I can probably trust
AWS/GCP/Azure/Backblaze/whatever; not sure about random-blockchain-guy
#67812).

------
zherbert
Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community
discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks
today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and
over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete
directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the
marketplace dynamics, in particular, will foster competition between hosts on
the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for
storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.

~~~
solidasparagus
Pretty arrogant to say you're going to make cloud storage providers obsolete
when you haven't even built a competing solution. You can't even share data
yet...

And what about all the other features that cloud providers offer? You say
"[the] Sia software is exponentially improving, and performance and featureset
is quickly approaching Amazon S3", but I see absolutely no evidence of even
the most basic features of cloud storage providers.

Authorization? Regulatory compliance? High-performance bandwidth? High-
reliability public API/URLs? Customer support? Private cloud peering? Zero
effort integration with many (most?) major data-related open source projects?
Versioning? One-click, no-knowledge reliability?

How much do you need to grow to hit cloud scale? 1,000,000x? More? And you're
already claiming that you're going to make S3 obsolete?

Your blog would hold more weight if you weren't so over-the-top, bullshit-
level optimistic.

~~~
peterkelly
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

~~~
EthanHeilman
I often enjoy the cynicism of HN as a counterpoint to the typical breathless
media coverage of new technology. However that now famous comment on dropbox
is a good demonstration that cynicism isn't a short cut to truth.

------
perlgeek
> and their prices are suspiciously similar at about $20 per TB per month.
> Today it is possible to purchase a refurbished 1 TB hard drive for about $20
> — so buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the
> hard drives used to store their data!

Really? That's the argument? That you could store your files cheaper on a
single, refurbished disk without considering the cost of housing, electricity,
network, physical security, redundancy, management etc.?

~~~
lunchables
Aren't all those costs priced in? I assumed the data storage with Sia was
redundant and encrypted, which should cover basically all of those things,
right?

Looks like it from looking at the site:

>File segments are created using a technology called Reed-Solomon erasure
coding, commonly used in CDs and DVDs. Erasure coding allows Sia to divide
files in a redundant manner, where any 10 of 30 segments can fully recover a
user's files.

[...]

>Before leaving a renter's computer, each file segment is encrypted. This
ensures that hosts only store encrypted segments of user data.

I'd love for someone to do an analysis on the performance and availability of
the data. I wonder if you could pay more for faster speeds or higher levels of
redundancy? That would be neat features.

------
jonas21
> Hosts on Sia do not have to worry about building and maintaining enormous
> datacenters, employing thousands of employees, and marketing their services.
> They only need to worry about providing reliable storage capacity to renters
> on Sia.

I would expect that building large datacenters and employing people to manage
them is exactly how you go about providing reliable storage capacity.

And while it's true that providers don't have to worry about marketing or
branding, well... the flip side is that they can't do any marketing or
branding and need to compete in a market where the product is completely
commoditized.

~~~
Taek
Sia is built on a completely different assumption than most large datacenters
- uptime requirements for hosts are around 95%, which equates to about 36
hours of downtime per month.

This means that you can run a much leaner database and require substantially
less expertise to keep things going. If a rack goes down, you don't need
someone on-site to bring it up ASAP, you can fix it the next workday without
upsetting your customers.

95% uptime for hosts translates to 99.99+% uptime for Sia users, because users
store data across hosts in a 10-of-30 scheme. As long as 10 out of 30 of the
hosts are online, you will be able to access your data. The probability of
losing 20 hosts when each of your 30 hosts have 95% uptime is exceedingly
small; your practical uptime depends more on the reliability of the software
than it does the reliability of the hosts you use.

As for commoditization: that's the goal! If we can completely commoditize data
storage, prices should come down dramatically, and the market should be a lot
more efficient. You won't need to be an Amazon or Google to have a stable and
competitive data offering.

~~~
q3k
> This means that you can run a much leaner database and require substantially
> less expertise to keep things going. If a rack goes down, you don't need
> someone on-site to bring it up ASAP, you can fix it the next workday without
> upsetting your customers.

This is already the case for cluster storage systems like Ceph.

~~~
namibj
This extends to the whole site. You don't need backup power. At all. Maybe no
redundant network equipment, if you get replacements on speed dial. Likely no
redundant fiber, just don't take your time to arrange a replacement if someone
cuts it (use a different, pre-scheduled conduit you can rent and fill with
fiber in a day or two).

If you get unexpected "bus factor", you can handle replacement combing back
early from holiday.

Get creative.

------
neiman
I tried Sia about 2 years ago. It worked "ok" for half a GB files, However,
for 4-5 GB my upload got stuck while the help forum couldn't provide answers
besides "wait for the next release".

There were also unclear issues back then. Are the files encrypted on my
computer before being uploaded? are they sharded between many hosts? or are
they stored in one host? How long will they be stored.

Most of these issues seem like they could be improved. Not an inherent faults
of the technology or something. I like Sia's idea and tech in general; I'll
give it a try again now.

~~~
Taek
Sia has come a long way in the past two years. Uploads, downloads, and repairs
are both much more stable and also a lot faster. Sia can effortlessly sustain
100mbps upload and download if your connection is that fast.

Sia is happy with files that are hundreds of GBs in size today, and with a
filesystem that that gets up to about 20 TB. Beyond that it starts to
struggle, but we're continuously working to expand its capabilities.

Data has always been encrypted client-side, even in very early releases. Data
today is sharded between hosts in a 10-of-30 Reed-Solomon scheme.

I think you will find that the experience is much smoother and more complete
compared to the experience from 2 years ago. And, a critical feature is now
available as of the latest release: seed based file recovery. After you upload
your files, it's possible to create a snapshot of your data that you can
recover later on a different machine using nothing more than your wallet seed.
This makes Sia a practical and cost effective solution for secondary or
tertiary backup.

------
ukd1
Long time user and follower of Sia. It's always surprising to me that it's
overlooked compared to filecoin (which is similar, but seems like $250m+
vaporware to date). I use it to have tertiary backups.

Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large.

~~~
xur17
> Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large.

This and the cost to form contracts is is large enough that it doesn't make
economical sense until you are storing > $1gb.

That said, they seem to slowly be working through a number of these concerns.
They very recently released seed based backups, one of the biggest issues I
had last time I looked.

~~~
ukd1
Ya; that's another one - the same wallet on multiple machines = different set
of contracts. Didn't notice that was fixed though...

~~~
zherbert
We do not yet have the ability to share the same set of contracts across
multiple machines, but it is on the roadmap. This would include using the same
set of contracts on desktop and mobile devices, which will open up some
intriguing use-cases.

------
tempsolution
This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even
go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks?
Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the
single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity.

If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3
was made for an entirely different purpose and Sia can't even remotely compete
with it.

As a personal data store? Maybe. But wait until this thing becomes more
popular and hackers start making a mess. Will be interesting to see how stable
this "fully decentralized" network is, once it gets the full attention from
bad actors as all the cloud providers.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
You are being deceived by Amazon's PR machine at its finest. The 11 9s of
durability are a "design", not a guarantee. The official PR line at the time
was "S3 is designed to provide 11 9s of durability".

There's still no SLA on durability AFAIK.

~~~
easymodex
Actually it is 11 9s of durability, but availability is a different story.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Parent comment mentioned durability, in fact. Not sure where did you read
availability?

------
siavosh
Can someone explain the difference between Sia vs Filecoin/IPFS. The latter
seems to be still working on solving some fundamental crypto primitives before
they can offer what seems like what Sia already claims to have solved?

~~~
wmf
Yes, Filecoin is trying to come up with a "more efficient" and possibly
"elegant" implementation based on algorithms that are still being invented. Of
course, with 100x the budget it's possible that they could still overtake Sia.

------
nisten
There is one missing piece to all this, I/O.

Given they publish their apps on all platforms they could probably add this in
the future as an ssd or PCIe storage tier by doing regular disk benchmarks.

However it seems like a major limiting factor, given that random access speeds
on spinning drives or even cheap ssds can drop drastically by an order or two
of magnitude (i.e. from 130MB/s to 2MB/s). Given how they're doing error
correction in a distributed manner, having a fast storage tier would be a
major advantage for them which would eliminate any problems from flash storage
wearing out and fully gain the benefit of throughput, random access times and
cheap new prices of nvme drives.

At the moment I probably can't use this for streaming my own 4k videos to
myself because an up to 300mbps network is not good enough for that, the
slowest storage in it would be a bottleneck for a significant amounts of the
experience of watching the streamed file.

And I definitely can't use it for application storage given how important
response time is to the user experience and user growth.

That all aside, those 2 are relatively extreme examples and there's a lot of
usage scenarios in between them.

I do admire how far they've gotten this given all the blockchain hyped
products that have failed. They seem to have a solid system here that will
only improve on performance and put pressure on bringing online storage prices
down.

~~~
Taek
Most 4K video is closer to 50mbps. If your home connection is that fast, Sia
should be more than capable of delivering smooth 4K streaming to your home.

A single host with slow storage is not a blocking factor because Sia downloads
in parallel from as many as 30 hosts at once when composing a stream of data.
Even if each has an I/O bottleneck of 1 MB/s (8mbps), you'll be able to get
your video out at 240mbps.

In practice today, Sia hosts are almost all network bottlenecked, most use
HDDs which do not have trouble keeping up with network latencies (HDD seek
times are 11ms, network latencies usually 50ms+) or throughputs (HDDs can
usually get close to 100 MB/s, far more than the network throughput)

Can I ask, have you tried streaming 4K video from the latest version of Sia?
Seek times might be 5-10 seconds, but I believe that once your stream has
loaded you will see completely smooth playback. Our next release has a focus
on reducing those seek times, but the code is not ready yet.

~~~
nisten
That's interesting, and very informative thanks.

No I have not tried it however, based on your information, this looks ideal
for something like showing auto-playing video on a splash screen using your
API to pull the file on the client side.

    
    
      /renter/stream/*siapath [GET]

------
buildzr
I'm trying to understand the reliability story better. I'm currently looking
at this page:

[http://siastats.info/contracts_status](http://siastats.info/contracts_status)

Does that mean for every individual hoster-renter contract, of ones that were
established and used, some ~9% of them failed?

That would essentially mean that to get equivalent numbers to those advertised
by B2, which claims 11 9s I'd need to buy over 10 contracts. Is this actually
how bad it is at the moment?

~~~
Taek
You are correct that the failure rate for contracts is somewhere around 9%,
and you are also correct that you need over 10 contracts to get 11 9's of
redundancy, however this doesn't translate to needing 10x redundancy on the
Sia network to get high reliability.

Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in a
10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of data
is held by 30 hosts, and out of those 30 hosts any 10 of them are sufficient
to recover the original data. This has a total overhead of 3x, and the
algorithms behind it are in my opinion super fascinating.

If you assume each host independently has 91% uptime, you get this amount of
downtime as a result:
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+(30+choose+x)+*...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+\(30+choose+x\)+*+0.91%5Ex+*+\(1-0.91\)%5E\(30-x\),+from+1+to+10)

In reality, the software reliability is a bigger factor in downtime than the
host's reliability.

~~~
buildzr
> Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in
> a 10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of
> data is held by 30 hosts, and out of those 30 hosts any 10 of them are
> sufficient to recover the original data.

This sounds good - I'm just trying to understand how this is counted - are you
establishing 30 separate contracts to achieve this?

~~~
Taek
Sia maintains 50 contracts with hosts at all times, and uses 30 of them for
each file segment that gets uploaded. We use state channels, so we can use the
same contracts each time you upload a new file, minimizing the total amount of
on-chain activity.

------
SimianLogic2
Can someone ELI5 why you need a blockchain for this? Another startup could
make a non-blockchain version of this that uses similar syncing technology to
GDrive / Dropbox file sync that just syncs other people's stuff instead of
yours and pays you monthly.

~~~
hanniabu
Non-reliant on central services or entities.

~~~
snarf21
This also cuts both ways. Your business needs a file but your customer can't
connect to that node because of some political blocking of internet
connections. Who can you rely on? What central service can you call to get
this fixed asap?

~~~
buildzr
The idea with Sia is you upload to not one, but several people, you pick the
level of redundancy you want and if you can't get the file you want from any
given one of them, they pay the price and you get it from someone else.

------
alexnewman
I was greatly skeptical of these types of systems but ipfs proved me wrong.
It's fine, when combined with a CDN. I'm interested in what new use cases Sia
handles when CDN + IPFS works so well. For instance my blog
[https://www.wuli.nu](https://www.wuli.nu) (source code
[https://github.com/posix4e/blog](https://github.com/posix4e/blog))

~~~
psKama
Can you please clarify which CDN features are you referring to on your blog
(can't find any) or anywhere else? Also can you elaborate what do you even
mean by "so well"? Sia was started to be built before IPFS was even announced
and has hosted PBs of data already as a working product. On the other hand
IPFS hasn't even released it's public testnet so it would be great to
understand your point. Edit: btw by IPFS I assume you refer to their Sia
equivalent product, Filecoin. At least I do, as IPFS cannot be compared to Sia
alone.

~~~
alexnewman
I am in no way referring to filecoin. I am talking about IPFS and cloudflare
integration. [https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-
gateway/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/)

------
yasp
How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

~~~
Ajedi32
All data is fragmented and encrypted, so it's impossible to know whether a
particular host is storing a fragment of illegal content or not. I suppose if
you somehow _did_ find out you were hosting a fragment of illegal content you
could breach the storage contract (and pay the resulting penalty) but that's
very unlikely because, again, all content is encrypted.

~~~
mtlynch
Encryption on Sia happens on the client-side, so the host has no guarantee
that the file is actually encrypted.[1]

For encrypted data, I think it will be similar to the situation with other
storage providers. If law enforcement searches your computer and discovers
that you've uploaded illegal content in encrypted form to S3/GCS/Mega
(especially Mega because they make it so easy to upload client-side encrypted
data), then law enforcement will order the provider to destroy all copies of
the data.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the provider is a Sia host. Law
enforcement entities have standard processes for reporting illegal content to
Amazon/Google/Mega/etc, and those companies have teams responsible for
handling those requests. Casual Sia hosts currently wouldn't know how to
handle such a request. The outcome might be that the compliance costs are too
big for casual home users, so hosting on Sia becomes a specialized task that
only dedicated companies can provide.

[1]
[https://lukechampine.com/irresponsible.html](https://lukechampine.com/irresponsible.html)

~~~
Ajedi32
I think someone technically skilled enough to run a Sia host would also be
skilled enough to know how to delete delete a specific file off their hard
drive. Sia could even provide a UI to make that easy. Though if Law
Enforcement has access to the client's encryption keys, I think chances are
it'd be way easier for them to just issue a delete command to the Sia network
directly.

~~~
nemo1618
We do in fact already make it trivial to remove content from your host. Law
enforcement can provide a list of hashes, which you pass as parameters to a
CLI command that deletes them.

------
theonlyklas
Although the cost of cloud backups are egregious compared to the cost of raw
storage, I'll pay a premium for the peace of mind that comes from letting
someone else be held liable for storing my data and credentials to access it.
I can easily upload/download files to google, iCloud, or Dropbox from almost
any device knowing only my email and password, which I find preferable to
having to remember an arbitrary 29 word seed. With the amount of exit scams in
cryptocurrency, too, I just don't trust any project to continue to provide the
same amount of utility that they do now, if they provide any at all.

I suppose you could use a custodian site to link an email and password to the
seed, but then you enter a centralized third party to the mix.

I see value in Sia but it's just not for the average person in its current
state.

~~~
Ajedi32
You could store your Sia seed for free on Google Drive. That way you get the
benefit of Google being "liable" for your data and credentials, but with the
much lower storage costs of Sia. Yes, it's a centralized third party, but you
already implied you have no problem with that.

------
hereme888
Just switched to backing my data on Sia. Was previously using Nextcloud, which
is great, but more expensive.

Took a little time to set up, but renting 200 GB for 10 cents/mo, in a
decentralized system that encrypts my data, has great uptime, and doesn't mine
my personal or "aggregated" data, is unbeatable.

I heard Sia is not great at handling large number of files, so I'm using a
backup software to create automated, compressed backups first, and Sia handles
those larger files.

I'll see how it pans out over time.

------
gridlockd
I have a feeling this is an apples to oranges comparison.

Can you serve clients directly over HTTP using Sia in a permissioned manner?
If not, then it's not usable like S3. If it's not usable like S3, then S3
pricing comparison is meaningless.

Also, how correlated is Sia pricing to the overall cryptocurrency market? Will
my costs go through the roof when there's another crypto bubble?

Would it actually scale? If Sia became popular, would prices go up like
Bitcoin transaction prices? Isn't the extremely cheap bandwidth due to spare
capacity of average broadband plans? If so, wouldn't providers eventually cut
that off? Broadband pricing relies on the fact that most users don't use all
of the bandwidth most of the time.

------
b_tterc_p
> How is this possible? By removing intermediaries

> [Sia] makes a small transaction fee from each file contract.

Am I wrong in observing that the number of intermediaries between hosting data
on AWS == the number of intermediaries oh Sia == 1?

What exactly is this doing? Blockchain contracts to rent out your hard drives?

~~~
Ajedi32
They explain what the mean by that two sentences later:

> Hosts on Sia do not have to worry about building and maintaining enormous
> datacenters, employing thousands of employees, and marketing their services.
> They only need to worry about providing reliable storage capacity to renters
> on Sia.

And yes, it's essentially a decentralized storage market built on smart
contracts. You can either pay to store your files (the client software handles
redundancy, contracts, etc automatically) or _get_ paid to rent out space on
your hard drive.

~~~
b_tterc_p
How do they verify that a host can actually store all of the data?

~~~
Taek
Ajedi32 is not correct.

Data is verified probabilistically on the Sia network. The blockchain has
access to the Merkle root of the data that the host is supposed to be storing.
The blockchain will request that the host provide a 64 byte segment of the
data (chosen randomly) along with a Merkle proof that the data is part of the
Merkle root.

If the host can provide the data and the proof, the host is rewarded as though
they've demonstrated that they have all of the data. If the host cannot
provide those 64 bytes along with a proof, the host is punished as though they
are not storing any of the data.

~~~
b_tterc_p
How does punishment work? What stops one bad actor from agreeing to collect
infinite data from a variety of sources and tanking both the trust and
profitability of data hosts?

Also what about bandwidth constraints on the host end

~~~
Taek
When a host agrees to accept data, they put up out-of-pocket money. This makes
it expensive for a bad actor to accept an infinite amount of data, as each
piece of data requires more collateral to be put forward by the host.

Before a renter creates a contract with a host, the renter will perform some
measurements on the host and determine if the host is suitable. A renter in
China will chose different hosts than a renter in the US, because the
latencies and throughputs of each host will be different.

~~~
b_tterc_p
Is there somewhere I can read about the punishments in more detail? E.g. how
often the quizzes are, what the penalty is for getting it wrong / not being
available for the answer?

------
dnprock
This is a flashback for me to 2006. I was working on storage technology and
reviewing a few products in p2p storage. There's too much burden to apply p2p
to get space. Storage is cheap enough for this idea to work.

------
rsync
"The cloud storage industry is very similar to the financial industry in that
trust is a necessity ..."

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-
backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

"I Found the Holy Grail of Backups"

------
nullandvoid
This takes me back I still have a few of there coins sitting around from years
ago that have done nothing but tanked ( this was somewhat expected but I
wanted to diversify in alts and this looked like one of the cooler options )

------
truth_seeker
Can somebody from Sia team compare it to Radix DLT and it's mechanism to shard
and distribute data ?

[https://www.radixdlt.com/](https://www.radixdlt.com/)

------
x3haloed
Is forums.sia.tech down temporarily or permanently?

------
2youmich
Sia is a future

------
pmlnr
These ideas are all the wrong direction to decentralize. We don't need more
layers and more complexity and more blockchains, we need simple, reliable,
accessible household appliances. For storage, for sharing, for posting.

Please stop adding layers and layers of calculations, it's a waste of energy.

~~~
anonymous5133
From what I understand, right now these projects are working on the backbone
of the systems. In the future, other developers will be able to create
services on top of these platforms to resell the storage space. So maybe
someone will have an online cloud hosting service with a simple drag and drop
online interface. They will charge a fee to the customer and the website
operator will simply buy storage contracts on SIA or similar providers to
provide the actual hosting and distribution of the files.

~~~
filebase
You would be correct!

Filebase[1] provides S3-compatible object storage at a fraction of the price.
We happily use Sia on our backend. :)

[1] [https://filebase.com](https://filebase.com)

------
abalone

      Don't give up, I won't give up
      Don't give up, no no no
      Don't give up, I won't give up
      Don't give up, no no no
    

\- Blockchain guys

(I know I know.. I couldn’t resist.)

