How To Decentralise Your Blog

The internet has developed in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways since its inception, and each year, it becomes easier for those who have no coding ability to start to contribute to the internet at large. The web hosts around 1 Billion blogs, and it continues to grow each month, expanding the breadth of the internet and providing more knowledge, more opinions and more insights into various parts of the world.

Social media has taken many of the concepts of blogging and stripped out the complexity to make it easier to use and understand, but you also sacrifice privacy and autonomy. If you're reported or flagged for good or bad reasons, you can kiss all your content on a social media platform goodbye.

Owning your domain name and hosting your content on a site that only you have access to can be one way to reduce the impact that social media can have on your voice and content but it doesn't mean its full proof.

Blogs can be vulnerable too

The same can happen to a blog if requested a hosting provider can remove your blog without your permission and take down all your content which may have taken weeks if not years to put together.

So what can you do to protect all your digital content? You can centralise it, of course, an option that was not available to us in the past. Still, with the birth of distributed ledger technology, we can now break away from centralised control and take real ownership of our digital assets.

What is a decentralised blog?

A decentralised blog is a site that you have complete ownership of and you are the only one that can edit it, transfer rights or provide access to the site. A decentralised blog users blockchain technology to provide you with a way to store your data that only you can access and is the first time you can own a website. A decentralised domain allows you to bypass hosting providers and not have to pay for the name and storage of your digital content.

A decentralised website also means that no central authority can take down your content and only through your action and permission can a website be updated or removed.

Why decentralise your blog

A decentralised blog gives you full ownership of the domain, the content and the use of your content, you're not renting a domain name from a licenced hosting provider. You're also not hosting your content on a centralised server where you again are renting space, be it a central server or cloud server. The majority of websites today rent the space and pay for it either annually or monthly.

When you have full ownership of your site, you can protect against things like:

Protect against censorship

Perhaps this won't apply to most of us, but in certain countries or specific stories that step on toes, censorship can be a real problem, and without decentralisation, stories can be stopped out and squashed.

• Think of someone exposing a scam company who has money to sue the individual and get him to take down their site or even bypass the person and go straight for the hosting provider.
• Think of the governments trying to cover up operations, like we've seen with WikiLeaks, decentralised blogs allow journalists to not only protect their identity but safely put their content online with no risk of censorship.
• Think of those who live in countries that do not have the freedom of speech laws that the west have, these voices can now have a place online to reach out.

Censorship may not be a problem for many of us, but there may come a time where we need to be censorship-resistant with our content, so why not have a backup in play.

Protect against hacking

Sites are hacked all the time; hackers either find exploits in the hosting provider's services or your website CMS and gain access to your website. Once in hackers can deface your website, they can block it and hold the content randoms, or they could replace it with another site.

If your site is decentralised short of them guessing your private keys to your wallet or finding it from you somehow, there is no way they can access your website. Your website now runs on the same security as the network it's built on like Ethereum or HIVE.

Protect against loss of content

Traditional websites are hosted on local servers or cloud servers overseas depending on the service provider you're working with at the time. These web servers are constantly created backups of your site but at intervals set by the service provider. There are times when changeovers can happen when the server loses content.

Additionally, user error can also see you lose content, but with a decentralised site. Every change is minted into the blockchain so you continuously have revisions that are immutable that you can refer to and restore to at times of panic.

How to decentralise your blog

At the moment, there are two ways to decentralise your blog each with their pros and cons; we'll review both methods so you can choose the method you feel suits your needs best.

dBlog

dBlog or dBlog.org is a dApp that runs on the delegated proof of stake blockchain known as HIVE. The dapp allows anyone with a HIVE wallet to create a blog with either a subdomain under the dblog.org domain. If you're using a custom domain or you can redirect it to a URL/Domain of your own. If your website is taken down you can spin it up in an instant on another domain name. 

All your content is stored on the HIVE blockchain and can only be edited and accessed by you via a HIVE based interface. This can be any website built on HIVE or the dBlog based site you've set up. You'll be able to make edits anywhere as longa s you have access to your wallet keys such as private and active keys.

Pros of dBlogs.org

• Easy to use, once you have a HIVE account it takes about 5 minutes to spin up a blog
• Host effective, all you need is around 10-20 HIVE staked in your account to operate which you can sell at any time should you no longer want the blog
• Earn HIVE through adding content on your blog
• Integration with all HIVE interfaces, so you have access to all HIVE users as an audience to interact with your content
• Can be viewed from a standard browser on both mobile and desktop
• Can spin up a site on multiple domains
• Faster transfer times via the HIVE dPos chain

Cons of dBlogs.org

• Domains are still centralised and can be taken down, so you can't be safe from having that version of your site removed.
• Need to own HIVE and staked in your wallet to use the service
• Need to buy a domain with a hosting provider if you want a custom URL
• Content is duplicated across multiple interfaces, so if you're planning on ranking for SEO, this might be rough.
• Open ecosystem and block explorer so people can track and view all your wallet transactions tied to your blog
• Can only receive other cryptocurrency tips via 3rd party services
• The network is not as secure as ETH using POW as HIVE uses DPOS

Is dBlogs your preferred solution?

If you like the sound of their decentralised blog offering, then you can out dBlogs here.

Unstoppable domain blogs

Unstoppable domains recently launched their blog offering, which allows you to add content to a .cypto or .zil TLD extension domain and build a blog on this site with file support from IPFS. The service allows you to fully customise the look and feel of your blog, which is great for those who feel too restricted by templates.

Pros of Unstoppable domain blogs

• Once off fee to own the domain
• Can accept tips from a variety of cryptos
• Can use a range of wallets to connect to your site
• Secured using Ethreums POW algorithm and secured to the main chain

Cons of Unstoppable domain blogs

• Since its run on Ethereum, you will need GAS/Eth in your wallet to cover various transaction costs
• You must create an account with 3Box to add a blog
• Can only update the site with the Unstoppable Domains interface
• Need Opera Browser or Browser extension installed to browse their decentralised websites
• Fees range depending on owners setting prices for domain names
• Crypto and Zil domains are not indexed by Google 
• Can only choose from .crypto and .zil domains 

Is Unstoppable domains your preferred solution?

If you like the sound of their decentralised blog offering, then you can out Unstoppable Domains here.

Ready to go decentralised?

Contact us

If you're having trouble getting started with a purchasing the right domain or set up a decentralised blog then feel free to contact us and let's see how we can help you get a domain to get started.

Are you looking to promote your business?

South African Business owners can create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions.

If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts about website domains.

• 9 Steps To Take Before Picking Your Domain Name
• Moz Launches Domain Authority Version 2.0 To Bring SEO Metrics Into 2019
• 6 Ways to Promote Your Web Hosting Company
• Everything you need to know about web hosting
• Does Web Hosting Affect SEO?

Tags: Blockchain , Cryptocurrency