SharedBits.org

Why do you pay for hosting? Why do sites get slower when they get more visitors? Why does Google need a million servers? How many people are online? How much space do you have left on your computer? What is the weakest link of the Internet? Why do sites go down? How can you help?

Introduction
The Internet is scalable. It is a collection of components that together form one network. Each node can be replaced if it fails and extra nodes can be added if needed. The network is always up and doesn’t rely on single nodes. A lot of components of the web are free or open source. MySQL runs most of the databases, servers run on Linux and apache and we browse the web with Firefox. There is one component however that is not scalable and not free: hosting

If a site gets more traffic the server it is hosted on becomes a weak link. Sure, we can add servers but not indefinitely and almost always after the fact. And adding servers is expensive and time consuming. Besides, the popularity of a page may come and go. Hosting, ideally, should scale up and down.

Bittorrent is a smart protocol which allows its users to up and download files through its network of connected clients. Files aren’t downloaded from one server but from all the clients on its network. Users of the protocol are both client and server. One of the benefits of BitTorrent is that popular files are hosted by more people and become faster to download.

Seti@Home allows fans of the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence ) to contribute computer processing power. They install a small client that takes over the computer of a user isn’t using it. All the clients together form one of the biggest and fastest computers in the history of the world.

SharedBits.org is a proposal for a new protocol for the hosting of internet content. Its long term goal is to strengthen this last weak link in the chain of nodes that makes the internet. One day we hope that all the connected clients on the web will together host the actual web itself. Sites will be become faster as they become more popular. Hosting will be free as long as you contribute some space to the network. Servers will never go down again.

This is an ambitious goal which we will need help with. The technological hurdles are great. But once you envision the technology in place and the internet moved from thousands of server to billions of clients we hope you to will see this as a logical next step for the future of the internet.