Exit rights, not a promise
Self-custody export is a real, documented process — a canister controller transfer, not a rewrite. You can read exactly how it works on your account's Export & ownership page before you ever need it.
A land-registry deed proves you hold a plot and lets you point to it independently of whoever's currently renting you the surrounding land. That's the model: your site's canister is the deed, Webstead is the surveyor and caretaker, and the Internet Computer is the ground it's built on.
The Internet Computer makes it possible to serve a website directly from a public, replicated blockchain network — no rented server, no centralized CDN required. That's a genuinely different foundation than the rest of the web sits on.
But in practice, using it meant installing a CLI, managing an identity and a cycles wallet, and hand-writing a project manifest — a fine workflow for a blockchain engineer, a real barrier for anyone who just wants to publish a site. Webstead exists to close that gap: connect a repo or drag a folder, and we handle the canister, the cycles, and the deploy.
We're a small, EU-based operator running this as a public beta — honest about what's solid today and what's still being built. See our FAQ for the specifics.
Self-custody export is a real, documented process — a canister controller transfer, not a rewrite. You can read exactly how it works on your account's Export & ownership page before you ever need it.
An asset canister is a standard Internet Computer primitive, not a Webstead-proprietary format. What we build on top is convenience — the underlying deed is always yours to take with you.
Every canister ID is public and checkable on the Internet Computer's own dashboard. Our status page shows real worker liveness and deploy success rates, not a marketing claim.
Webstead is currently a small, independently operated project rather than a large hosting company — which is exactly why we lead with transparency instead of asking you to take reliability on faith. The code, the deploy engine, and the framework-detection logic are all things we're happy to talk through directly.
Reach out directly, or take a look at the code on GitHub.