Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

[zzem]

Hey HN!

I'm excited to share something I've been working on: a way to set up and launch websites directly through the domain control panel. It allows anyone with a domain name to create, publish, and edit basic websites directly from the domain control panel without any traditional hosting providers or coding knowledge. This narrows the gap for non-technical people looking to publish simple personal and small business websites.

This is also the first TWA (triweb application) on the triweb platform (https://triweb.com) we are working on. Triweb currently has limited functionality, and this app is mostly just a showcase of how TWAs and triweb containers work. We have an exciting lineup of upcoming features and a unique, simple vision of the decentralized web without the overhyped web3 technologies. We hope that one day triweb will become a standard platform for local-first, browser-based decentralized web applications.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

About 16 years ago, I did a different experiment of hosting a website in DNS.

I put small web pages into DNS TXT RRs. Thus, one only needed to make a DNS request over UDP to retrieve the web page, instead of a DNS request and then an HTTP request over TCP. tinydns allows one to put any data into RRs, including control characters. RRs can therefore contain MIME headers. Then I put dnscache in front of it. The result was a highly resilient website with compact pages.

[XCSme]

I don't understand how this is "decentralized", the first step is "Point your domain at a triweb relay server".

Doesn't this make the triweb relay server the central authority?

[zzem]

At the moment, it does, but we plan to release a Docker image of the relay server so that anyone would be able to spin his/her own relay or use any other existing public relay.

The triweb platform is still a work-in-progress, and there is a lot left to be done, released, and documented. The Banner app is mostly just an early demo of how TWAs are built and how they may be deployed to domains, that I thought may be interesting to HN.

[hunterbrooks]

Pretty cool, even if it's a bit of a toy.

I'm no networking expert, but "without the need for web servers" isn't really correct because the DNS is a type of server, right?

[plagiat0r]

Using DNS for this is a very bad idea. The format to convert those strings to html may be good, the storage (DNS) is the bad part, especially that you can host such small files for free usually.

[zzem]

Using DNS for website content storage is indeed unconventional and somehow controversial, but I wouldn't say it is a bad idea per se. TXT records were designed to store arbitrary data (up to 4.000 bytes per single record) and the app is meant to be used for small websites with a few paragraphs of text, as managing anything bigger than through a domain control panel is rather painful.

[Kharacternyk]

This is a nice PoC. For how long are TXT records usually cached? Triweb might not see the latest changes to the websites for quite some time.

[zzem]

Thanks! The time for which TXT records are cached is determined by their TTLs. When publishing a DNS TXT record, you can usually set the TTL to be as low as 1 minute or even less, so any changes to the content would be picked up really quickly. (https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/ref...)

[Ringz]

Looks interesting! What are the advantages (besides the mentioned ones) and what are the disadvantages?

[zzem]

I think the main advantage is the ease and speed of use for people who want a simple, business-card-like website or a holding/landing page.

The main disadvantage is that due to the UI/UX of domain control panels, managing anything more than a few paragraphs of text gets messy really quickly. But that could be actually an advantage, as the DNS is not particularly well suited to serve large amounts of data, and the app itself is meant for small and simple websites.