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Cloudflare helps to provide access to millions of websites on the regular web. The company also offers an IPFS gateway, making it easier to access content on the censorship-resistant storage network. Unlike its CDN and DNS services, Cloudflare reports that it disables IPFS access in response to copyright abuse complaints.

The InterPlanetary File System, more broadly known as IPFS, has been around for a few years now.

While the name may sound a little alien to the public at large, the peer-to-peer file storage network has a growing user base among the tech-savvy.

In short, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available to each other. A website using IPFS is served by a “swarm” of users in much the same way BitTorrent users share content with each other.

Completely Decentralized

The advantage of this system is that websites can become completely decentralized. If a website or other resource is hosted on IPFS, it remains accessible as long as the computer of one user who “pinned” it remains online.

The advantages of IPFS are clear. It allows archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. It’s censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.

IPFS is also a perfect match for ‘pirate’ sites. Due to its decentralized nature, IPFS sites are virtually impossible to shut down. This aspect was already highlighted by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde back in 2016. More recently, IPFS was promoted by Z-Library after its domain names were seized