I have a couple of questions about whether certain things will be possible or not.
Will I it be possible to install SAFE on a server and use it as a kind of CDN, for example so that a clearnet website could serve pictures, videos or other content without storing them on the server itself?
Secondly, app developers get rewards - can more than one address be put into this or could some other technique be used by app developers to split their revenue automatically with whoever gets people to download it, as a kind of referral system? If so I hope there will be some developers who do this as I do a bit of affiliate marketing and I’d love to be able to promote SAFE apps.
I think that’s possible. People connect over the normal internet with a site like www.safeproxy.com and they can request SAFE websites which are forwarded to them. The only cost for that website will be data. And of course they need a little server at Amazon to run the SAFE Client.
Cool. I just thought of it because I’m hitting the limits of my shared hosting account for my blog atm. I guess it would depend on the economics whether it would be worth doing, but I find it an interesting possibility
You would be able to setup a SAFE Web proxy which would be a SAFE client and cache server, as well as a Web server.
But that’s not a CDN, at least not in my book.
Also, the web part of this CDN is public service. So whatever copyrighted material and illegal porn you serve form it, it may become your issue which may not be readily fixable.
I was thinking the webpage would request files from safe rather than the visitor - so you would only be serving your own content, not providing general access to safe for your visitors. For example you would place an image tag with src=someplaceonsafe in some way on a page hosting on the server, and site visitor wouldn’t know the image was coming from some place different.
If your image is src="safe://server.safe/link.jpg", then the user won’t recognize it. Or, if he has a safe browser, he’ll get it from SAFE Network (not from the Web server).
What you could do - kind of - create a proxy server such as Squid and have it map HTTP to SAFE (the server would fetch data from SAFE, and show them to user via HTTP).
If you want to serve your own content, it’s probably easier just to not use SAFE (you can put 10GB on SSDs for couple of bucks per month, that’s a lot of cat videos!) because for up to several GB, it’s faster (to have the files on the server) and easier (no need to configure anything except the server).
But if you’re doing some shifty marketing scheme or serve ISO’s, you may want to use SAFE. But it might get pricey because most hosting companies charge for bandwidth if you consume a lot of it, so … It may be easier to tell users where to download a SAFE browser and where to find you with it.