How We Use Blockchain Technology Behind the Scenes

The chances are you might have seen other static site hosting platforms, but the likelihood of finding something exactly like Orbiter is going to be pretty unlikely. Most other platforms inevitably become walled gardens, where a user is locked in and has a hard time migrating their website or content. This is partly due to the tech stack underneath most platforms, which is centralized servers owned by said companies. Orbiter on the other hand has a different approach.

At Orbiter we’ve used our previous experience with IPFS and blockchain to build a more open model that can give users control over their websites. In this post we’ll go into some of the details of how we’ve built Orbiter and the blockchain technology behind it!

The InterPlanetary File System, or “IPFS” for short, is a unique file sharing protocol that uses a mix of peer to peer and cryptography principles to build a distributed network for sharing content. The network is made up of lots of computer or servers running IPFS nodes, a way to access and help upkeep the network. By running a node you can share files from your own machine or import from other machines. When you share a file on IPFS it gets a special cryptographic hash called the Content Identifier, or CID. They look something like this:

Like other file hashing techniques, this hash is based on the contents of the file. One small change and you’ll get a totally different hash. However this CID also acts as the address to locate the content on the IPFS network, and through its cryptographic hashing the file is also immutable. This ends up working pretty well for static website hosting, as the immutable properties make it great for CDNs and caching the content.

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