One company's decision, and you're offline
A conventional host can suspend an account over a policy dispute, a payment hiccup or no stated reason, and your site stays dark until it's resolved on their terms.
Deplatforming
A conventional host is a company that can change its prices, its terms or its mind about your account. A public network can't, not because the operator is nicer, but because no single operator is in charge.
Every box on the top row is something a company owns and can switch off, re-price or lose. The bottom row has no such box.
A conventional host can suspend an account over a policy dispute, a payment hiccup or no stated reason, and your site stays dark until it's resolved on their terms.
Bandwidth and compute on the big clouds are famously hard to predict. Cycles are metered per computation and visible as runway, so you watch the number move instead of opening an invoice.
Leaving a major cloud usually means rewriting infrastructure, not changing DNS. An asset canister is a documented primitive, and the exit is a controller change.
Your built site (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images) is stored inside an asset canister: a smart-contract-backed program on the Internet Computer with its own HTTP request handler. It's replicated across a subnet of independently operated nodes that reach consensus on every state change, the same way any other blockchain transaction does.
When a browser requests your site, a gateway routes the request to that canister, which answers directly. There is no reverse proxy in front of a rented VM and no centralized CDN deciding whether to serve you today.
Webstead's job is everything around that: provisioning the canister, funding its cycles, running the deploy, watching the balance and giving you a dashboard instead of a CLI. The decentralization is structural. The convenience is what we add on top.
We'd rather you know than assume.
Asset canisters serve files. Frameworks that need a persistent Node process (SSR, API routes) aren't a fit; static exports and client-rendered SPAs are. Motoko backends are the exception, and they're supported.
Compute and storage cost cycles, always. Webstead funds them under a monthly budget while we're in beta. Understand the model before relying on it for something critical.
No SLA yet, and self-custody export is support-mediated rather than one click. The FAQ has the exact works-today and not-yet lists.
You're comparing hosts and want to be able to leave without a migration project. A controller transfer, not a rewrite.
You'd rather check a canister ID against a public dashboard than take a status page's word for it.
You don't want to learn dfx or manage a cycles wallet. You want push-to-deploy and a URL that works.
Free while in beta. If it's not for you, your canister leaves with you.