If you pin to IPFS and then use a public http gateway like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com, which caches and distributes via their CDN, you'll have a good CDN alternative.

If you just use IPFS directly with a non-CDN'd, non-cached http gateway, the latency will probably be prohibitive for regular web stuff.

So what stops me from abusing Cloudflare's gateway as a free CDN for petabytes of traffic? There has to be a catch?

Edit: found it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/al8emd/cloudflare_ban...

But isn't it like a torrent? where if more people are viewing the item, it can be served faster from more places, like torrent seeders?

Yes, definitely. I mean, you certainly get better bandwidth and latency depending on popularity and geographic diversity of seeders, and there are even youtube-alternative websites that host videos on IPFS. But for something like browsing from one page to the next, where the payload is small and you want <200ms latency, I think just the DHT lookup might already put you above that budget. I'm guessing though, haven't made any measurements.

Who gets <200ms latency anymore when Google analytics and FB pixel tracking scripts take more than that each and most websites have them?

Those scripts are loaded asynchronously; you can start seeing content before they are ready.

In torrent when you download something you also announce yourself as a seeder. In ipfs afaik you have to explicitly pin something in order for your peer to be announced as a provider.

This means that even if your content in ipfs is popular it won’t be fast.

No, everyone with the item is a seeder in ipfs. Pinning means the node won't delete it.

I should add, since you didn't specifically mention web stuff, that it _can_ be used as a CDN for stuff that is less latency-sensitive, like software package managers. That is in fact, the main focus of 2019 for Protocol Labs, the company behind IPFS.

AWS and IPFS are so different that you can't compare then. I'd say that the right comparison of IPFS is to BitTorrent.

If I am supposed to host my website on it, I want to know how much it would cost (for a given service level). Don't really care if the tech is more like butterflies or turtles...

IPFS nodes generally cache data that has been accessed recently, so if your website is the most accessed content on IPFS you can host it for free just by sharing it once and users will have relatively quick access to it because nodes directly connected to them will probably have a cached copy already. If requests are rare, expect to host it yourself or pay a pinning service, and expect higher latency as users will be requesting content hosted multiple hops away. You should care whether the tech is butterflies or turtles, because you can't compare butterflies and turtles -- or you can, but the comparison breaks down when you ask which will get to an undefined point x quicker. If x is in the air, butterflies; if x is in the water, turtles.

AWS S3 has bittorrent support...