Deplatforming
One company's decision, and you're offline
A conventional host can suspend your account for a policy dispute, a payment hiccup, or no stated reason at all — and your site goes dark until it's resolved on their terms.
A conventional host is a company that can change its prices, its terms, or its mind about your account. A public blockchain network can't — not because the operator is nicer, but because no single operator is in charge.
A conventional host can suspend your account for a policy dispute, a payment hiccup, or no stated reason at all — and your site goes dark until it's resolved on their terms.
Bandwidth and compute pricing on major clouds is notoriously hard to predict in advance. Cycles cost is visible and metered per computation — you can watch the runway drop in real time instead of finding out at the end of the month.
Move off a major cloud host and you're often rewriting infrastructure code, not just changing DNS. An asset canister is a standard, documented primitive — and the export path is a controller change, not a migration project.
Your built site — HTML, CSS, JS, 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 and reaches consensus on every state change, the same way any other blockchain transaction does.
When a browser requests your site, an IC gateway routes the request to that canister, which returns the response directly — no reverse proxy in front of a rented VM, no centralized CDN deciding whether to serve you that day.
Webstead's job is everything around that: provisioning the canister, funding its cycles, running the deploy, watching its balance, and giving you a dashboard instead of a CLI. The decentralization is real and structural — the convenience is what we add on top.
Asset canisters serve static files. Frameworks that need a persistent Node server (SSR, API routes) aren't a fit yet — static exports and client-rendered SPAs are.
Compute and storage cost cycles, always. Webstead funds them for you under a budget during the beta; understand the model on our cycles & runway doc before you rely on it for something critical.
No SLA yet, self-custody export is support-mediated rather than one click. See the FAQ for the exact "works today / not yet" list — we'd rather you know than assume.
You're evaluating hosts and want the option 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.
Or skip ahead and deploy your first site — it's free during the beta.