That's true, but a Hetzner server is only in a single datacenter. A closer comparison might be a CDN service like Cloudflare for free, or https://bunnycdn.com/pricing for about $0.01/GB. Both distribute your assets across the globe for reduced latency.
So, I work for a company that provides CDN services so take that into account, but, putting on my personal, not work, head, this type of service worries me for two reasons.
1. It's asking website owners to install JavaScript that uses the website owner's visitors' bandwidth for purposes other than visiting the website. That feels misaligned and not something I'd expect as a user visiting a website.
2. It also puts me, the end user, in an odd position because I don't control the content that is being stored and served from my machine.
Putting those two things together I find myself worrying about the following scenario: I visit site example.com that serves content that is legal in my jurisdiction. example.com is using arc.io and while I'm browsing example.com some content that is illegal in my jurisdiction is served to someone. This puts me in a position where illegal content was stored and served from my machine.
I think that puts me in a dangerous position just for surfing example.com.
If I signed up for Arc Rewards then I might get paid for storing and serving illegal content.
> It's asking website owners to install JavaScript that uses the website owner's visitors' bandwidth for purposes other than visiting the website.
We endeavor to create a communal web where everyone cooperates and benefits, and we want to make that as easy as just visiting your favorite website. Everyone shares a little surplus bandwidth to help each other load the web faster, sustain their favorite sites, and earn rewards. Everyone wins.
That's a different web than the current web. Right now, with the current web, no one shares and nothing is shared with you. The web isn't communal; it's adversarial. Ads interrupt you and trackers stalk you. We want to change that.
It will take time. Just like how the once frightful notions of getting into a stranger's car (Uber) or sleeping in a stranger's house (Airbnb) are now banal. These things take time.
But, of course, if preferred, an opt out is two clicks away. Sites with Arc must display Arc's widget in the lower left so visitors can learn about Arc and easily opt out (or back in).
> I think that puts me in a dangerous position just for surfing example.com.
When one visits nytimes.com, they don't know what files will be downloaded and cached on their computer before they hit [enter]. They trust nytimes.com not to hand them inappropriate content (porn, violence, etc).
Arc has that same responsibility -- to only cache appropriate, legal content. It's our responsibility to get that right. And we will.
- Sites, and their content, are reviewed and vetted before they get access to Arc's CDN.
- Automated checks are run on assets for appropriateness, a la Google's SafeSearch Cloud Vision API. Inappropriate content never enters the network.
On top of that, only fragmented, encrypted data is cached on devices. Devices never receive the full puzzle -- only a single, fragmented puzzle piece, scrambled beyond recognition.
Hope that helps.
Also, and wholly unrelated: big fan of Movie Code. =]
Honestly, I consider this on the same level of malicious behavior as if a site added a bitcoin mining script on their page to "share" some of my CPU. By your own admission, opt out is two clicks away, and even that requires you to 1) recognize the Arc logo and 2) know what it does and that you can opt out.
I hope Arc.io gets added to most popular ad/tracking/mining blocker list soon. I hate when sites do something you did not consent with. Their site including - they ask to opt out without offering to opting in first.
I experimented with one of the early P2P CDN's, which appears to be the same thing Arc.io is doing. Very quickly the widget ends up on all the major adblock lists and... it does basically nothing for you.
One one site that had a few hundred unique visitors per day, and the P2P CDN "saved" me kilobytes per month in bandwidth costs. Maybe a higher traffic site would see more benefit (especially if it isn't focused at tech people who have a nearly 100% install rate for ad blockers).
>Users receive 10% in user rewards for sharing bandwidth with the network.
Does this mean the users who are visiting the site with the Arc widget (acting as seeds for the p2p cdn)? Is Arc going to send me a check in the mail, and if so, what registration do I need to do to get that money?
If most users don't sign up to be paid, what happens to their "share" of that 10%? Is it redistributed to other users, or kept by Arc?
Reading their full page on this, the current setup is donating the currency to Wikipedia (which, individually I'm fine with), and I imagine that if it's unclaimed and your nose/browser is unlinked to your account, money is continued to be sent there.
Appears to just be using webtorrent, though this does not seem to be mentioned. It's a clever technology, but also has limitations and compatibility concerns.
I'm not sure what other optimizations they're doing or what guarantees it has. Wish they had a page with more complex assets being delivered via their CDN to test performance. Their own site is being delivered this way, but I don't think that's the use-case. There are many ways to host simple static sites free/cheap -- the big CDN costs often come from media like videos or images, which in addition to being delivered also need to also have very low latency to "feel" fast. (Not sure a jpeg fragmented and delivered over WebRTC is going to outperform a CDN delivering it over a single HTTP request regardless of how fast it is. Adaptive video is also not going to be straightforward.)
Price doesn't seem appealing to me given how it works and how little is explained. But it's a cool concept, and I'm all for new ways to decentralize content and/or save on delivery costs.
CDN Bandwidth $0.02 per GB
Egress (worldwide) (76% cheaper than AWS1)
Usage is billed monthly, on the first day of each calendar month.
Additionally, only peer-to-peer egress bandwidth is billed; all peer-to-peer ingress bandwidth is free. For example, if a 100kB image is loaded from Arc's peer-to-peer network, only 100kB of bandwidth is billed, not 200kB (100kB of egress + 100kB of ingress).
Not directly, no, but stick Cloudflare in front and now you have a cdn that the storage is cheap and depending on tier you pick, cdn is free. Even the bandwidth from b2 to Cloudflare is free.
But if they don't manage to outperform it (distributed tends to be slow), it won't really matter if it's officially a CDN or not. Amazon S3 is also not a CDN, yet many use it that way.
As long as it delivers better performance, it might be worth it.
This is neat and all, but their widget.js file is 888KB.
For comparison, Bootstrap is 180KB, Elm is 29KB and Vue.js is 100KB.
It might not be much for sites otherwise dealing with large multimedia assets, but for anyone going for lean / fast web development, this seems to be a no-go.
There is really no incentive to go via Arc.io. Instead make your users share content between each other client's. Still cool tech though, if it works, I'm a bit skeptical due to browser restrictions.
And Hetzner is a no-nonsense real company that's been around since 1997.
Hetzner machines have dedicated 1Gbps connections. Arc.io promises nothing.
Arc.io is a faceless company with no track record, no history, and doesn't say how long they've been around.
Who would you choose?