Introducing Webstead: your own plot on the open internet

Most "decentralized hosting" today means one of two things: a CLI you have to babysit, or a marketing page with no working product behind it. Webstead is our attempt at a third option — hosting on the Internet Computer that feels like the best parts of Vercel or Netlify, without asking you to learn dfx, manage a wallet, or watch a cycle balance by hand.

What "decentralized" actually buys you here

Your site doesn't live on a server we rent from a cloud provider. It lives in an asset canister — a smart-contract-backed program on the Internet Computer that serves HTTP responses directly from consensus, replicated across a subnet of independent node operators. There's no origin server to go down, no CDN contract to renegotiate, and no single company that can quietly deplatform you. The IC network is the server.

We still think that's a genuinely different value proposition than "yet another host" — but we're not going to oversell it. During the beta, Webstead itself controls the canisters and funds their cycles on your behalf, which is a convenience trade-off we're upfront about (see Why decentralized and our FAQ). You can move to self-custody whenever you want; nothing is locked in.

What shipped for the public beta

• Deploy from GitHub — connect a repo, we auto-detect the framework (Vite, Astro, Create React App, static Next.js export, or a custom build command), and push to your default branch redeploys automatically.
• Direct upload — no GitHub account needed. Drop a folder or a zip and we publish it.
• Custom domains — a guided wizard generates the DNS records the IC gateway needs, checks them for you, and flips your domain live once it resolves.
• Free {yoursite}.webstead.app subdomain — every site gets one automatically, no setup required.
• Cycle runway, in plain language — instead of a raw cycle counter, your dashboard shows days until your site would need attention, with budgeted auto top-ups so you're not caught off guard.
• A public status page — worker liveness, 24-hour deploy success rate, and queue depth, because "trust us" isn't a substitute for a dashboard you can check yourself.

What's still in progress

We say this plainly on the FAQ: there's no SLA yet, self-custody export is support-mediated rather than one click, and billing is free for the whole beta. We'd rather ship an honest beta than a polished-looking demo.

Try it

If you have a static site, a Vite/Astro/CRA project, or just a folder of HTML sitting around, you can have it live on the Internet Computer in a few minutes: create a free account and deploy your first site.