Happy New Year HN!
I’m the co-creator of Orbiter, a dead simple tool for uploading and hosting static sites. We built Orbiter for ourselves and realized it would probably be useful for others.
Static site content is some of the simplest on the web, yet hosting this content has gotten increasingly complex over time. Many of you are engineers and don’t have much problem with CI/CD pipelines as a mechanism for deploying a website. This is true for me as well. But there are times when I want to just upload a simple website. I might not even want to put it under source control. And I know this is true for a lot of others who don’t have the same level of coding and deployment experience as I do.
Combine this with AI’s rise in popularity and how easy it is now for anyone in the world to create a website, and Orbiter seems like a nice solution to getting static websites online.
On the technical side, we did something interesting. We actually use blockchain and IPFS behind the scenes. Having worked with IPFS for a number of years now, it’s always struck me as a really good tool for public content, especially when that content needs to be versioned. Websites fit this model nicely.
We wanted to create a system by which websites were not necessarily locked into Orbiter’s platform. So, every site that is uploaded gets its own smart contract on the Base blockchain. The site itself is uploaded to IPFS, and the CID is mapped to the site’s smart contract. When someone makes a change to their site and uploads new content, the new CID is mapped to the contract.
This does two things:
1. It allows anyone in the world to build a version history of the site
2. It allows the site’s creator to easily migrate off Orbiter without even having to access the Orbiter web app if they want
Ultimately, people may not care about the blockchain and IPFS aspects of the technology, and that’s fine. We specifically built it so that you didn’t even see this tech.
Would love to get feedback on the product, the idea, and the technology!
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