Dries Buytaert’s Web3 Site Still Runs After Four Years, Despite IPFS Hosting Shutdowns

The experiment began in 2022, when Dries uploaded the file to IPFS and mapped the ENS domain to its content hash. The page remained online after two years, and on its fourth anniversary, it still loads successfully, demonstrating the technical resilience of IPFS and ENS as protocols.

The surrounding ecosystem, however, has changed significantly. Several services that originally hosted or pinned IPFS content have shut down or pivoted, including Fleek, Infura, Web3.storage, Cloudflare’s public IPFS gateways, and Scaleway’s pinning service. Among the original providers, Pinata continues to host the file, and the eth.limo gateway still enables browser access to ENS domains.

Dries notes that IPFS behaves as designed: content remains available only while it is pinned. His page now depends largely on a single free-tier pinning service, which highlights the commercial fragility of decentralised hosting despite technical robustness. The limiting factor, he argues, is not the protocol but the economics, as demand for censorship-resistant hosting remains relatively small compared with conventional hosting.

Browser support has not improved over the same period. Brave removed its built-in IPFS support in 2024 due to low usage, and mainstream browsers still lack native ENS or IPFS integration, leaving gateway services as the primary access method.

Ethereum transaction costs have moved in the opposite direction. Updating ENS records, which cost over $11 in 2022, now costs roughly one cent. Increased block capacity and migration to Layer 2 networks have significantly reduced congestion, making ENS updates inexpensive enough that ENS Labs cancelled its planned Layer 2 “Namechain” project.

Dries characterises the outcome as mixed: the underlying technologies continue to improve, while the commercial ecosystem supporting decentralised hosting appears to be thinning. He plans to continue the experiment with additional redundancy rather than relying solely on third-party free services.