When you want to put a website online today, you are essentially forced to sign a lease with a digital landlord.
First, you pay an annual fee to a domain registrar for the privilege of renting a few characters of text. Then you hand your routing over to a centralized DNS provider like Cloudflare or AWS. Next, you pay a hosting company five to twenty dollars every single month just to serve a few kilobytes of static HTML and images.
If anyone in that chain gets nervous—whether it’s a politician pushing new online safety mandates, a corporate compliance officer terrified of controversy, or a registrar responding to an automated complaint—your site can simply be wiped from existence. The domain gets seized, the DNS records stop resolving, and the server gets pulled.
We have accepted this setup because it’s convenient, but it means that the modern web is built entirely on permission. You don’t own your web presence. You rent it until someone in power decides you shouldn’t have it.
Replacing Permission With Math
When I started working on Iroh Socks Proxy, the initial focus was peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted communication. I wanted to prove how absurd proposals like the EU’s Chat Control really are by showing that an amateur could build working, un-scannable encrypted chat over a weekend.
But as the architecture came together, it became obvious that direct encrypted messaging is only half the equation. The exact same protocol works just as well for hosting static websites.
Instead of registering a domain through ICANN and pointing it at an IP address via DNS, an address on this network ends in .anon. That address isn’t a rented label registered with an authority; it is the cryptographic public key of the node itself.
There is no domain registry to confiscate your identity. There is no centralized DNS server that can poison your records or refuse to resolve your traffic. When a user connects to your .anon site, their browser establishes a direct, encrypted QUIC connection to your node using that public key.
You replace contracts and corporate terms of service with raw mathematics.
The Five-Cent Server
The immediate problem with peer-to-peer web hosting has always been availability. If you host a website directly from your laptop, it goes offline the moment you close the lid or disconnect from your home Wi-Fi.
Keeping a dedicated machine running 24/7 in your living room works, but it isn’t practical for everyone. Paying ten dollars a month for a standard cloud virtual private server defeats the purpose of keeping things lightweight.
Because the proxy daemon is written in Rust, it compiles down to a native binary with an almost non-existent footprint. It doesn’t need layers of runtime overhead, heavy memory allocations, or complex web server stacks. It just needs a tiny sliver of compute.
By packaging the daemon into a minimal Docker container, you can deploy a 24/7 sovereign website to an edge runner like Bunny.net’s Magic Containers in a matter of minutes.
The entire site only requires a tiny storage volume mounted at /data. That volume stores a single, essential asset: your secret cryptographic key. The container executes the Iroh daemon, serves your static files, and sits quietly waiting for peer connections.
The cost for running this kind of minimal container around the clock comes out to literal pennies per month. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, you have a website that runs globally, twenty-four hours a day, entirely independent of the traditional web hosting industry.
True Portability
The real strength of this design is what happens when infrastructure fails.
If Bunny.net goes down, changes its terms, or decides it doesn’t want decentralized protocols on its edge network, your website is not lost. Because Bunny is only providing raw clock cycles and storage, they hold no leverage over your identity. They do not own your address.
To migrate the entire site, you simply copy your /data volume containing your private key. You can drop it onto a cheap one-dollar VPS, a Raspberry Pi sitting on your home desk, or another container platform, and start the daemon.
The moment the node connects to the network, your .anon website is back online at the exact same cryptographic address. There are no DNS propagation delays, no registrar transfers, and no lost traffic.
A Necessary Clarification on Privacy
It is important to be completely honest about what this system is and what it is not.
This is not Tor. It is not an onion-routing network that bounces your packets through three random volunteer nodes to conceal your physical IP address from the destination. When someone accesses an .anon site, the connection between their browser and your host is direct peer-to-peer over Iroh.
What it provides is complete payload confidentiality and architectural sovereignty. The hosting provider cannot inspect the encrypted traffic flowing into the node. An internet service provider cannot see which specific pages are being loaded. And most importantly, no corporate intermediary has the administrative authority to revoke the address.
We don’t have to accept an internet where publishing a thought, sharing an image, or hosting an idea requires a continuous license from corporate and bureaucratic middlemen. A resilient, private, and sovereign web doesn’t require millions of dollars in infrastructure.
It just requires math, a few megabytes of code, and about five cents a month.
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