Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

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.

Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS
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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.

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...)

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.

I should elaborate more about why I believe this is a bad idea to use DNS as storage / content.

First, because of a distributed nature of the DNS, clients do not directly fetch this data. Instead, resolvers and DNS forwarders do the work and cache it.

Secondly, because displaying or converting this data to html requires a special website or a dedicated client, at which point this dedicated component should use a different storage than DNS. Whatever that may be, p2p, etc.

Third, as the impact on the DNS ecosystem is problematic here. I will say something controversial by stating this: DNS had been designed in one goal, for you or your program to connect "to a string" that you or a string owner control and manage, as opose to connecting to a network address (IP) that you usually do not own, that can change at any time, and that it is meaningless and hard to remember. Over the years, this basic principle extend a bit with introduction of some policies being stored in the DNS that is meant to help the domain owner setting up some boundaries or policies, like SPF or CAA records.

Storing website data is not something I would recommend. Again, you can argue that this "client" only prints TXT data to users that would not normally be able to access it (average internet browser user) but clearly it goes far beyond this, encouraging storing domain content (data) into a DNS.

Fourth, security. Very few domains implements dnssec or curvedns and clients do not use DoH en masse. A mitm is a serious threat to the client rendering this data.

Fifth, if this gains wide adoption (doubt it), resolvers will stop caching TXT records as a policy to save resources for crucial data, and the crucial data is A(dress) record(s).

Because the purpose of the DNS on a high level view, is too make a connection between two programs or users. I know that's a simplification, but this is the core idea. Sure, it has reverse DNS mapings to assing a string onto a network address, but 99.99% of the time DNS job is to make connect() possible. So you connect() to Amazon using DNS, Amazon contacts payment processor using DNS, they connect() to Visa which connect() to your Bank and every connection in this payment processing chain use DNS to maka it possible and reliable.