How Stasho works

When you drop a folder on Stasho, your files are hashed into a content identifier (CID) — a fingerprint derived from the files themselves — pinned on Aleph Cloud’s storage network, and served over HTTPS through a caching gateway. Because the address is the fingerprint of the content, your Stasho deploy isn’t locked to Stasho: the same CID works on any IPFS-compatible host, so you can re-pin your site anywhere, at any time, without asking us.

Content addressing in 90 seconds

A conventional host gives your site a location: a URL that means “whatever is on our server under this name right now.” A content-addressed system gives your site an identity: the CID is computed from your files, so identical content always has an identical address, and changed content gets a new one. Two consequences fall out of that. Verification is built in — a CID either resolves to exactly the bytes it names or it doesn’t; there is no trust-us layer. And portability is built in — any host that speaks the protocol can serve the same CID, which is why “leave anytime” is a mechanism here, not a promise.

Where your site physically lives

While your project is active, Stasho pins it on Aleph Cloud’s storage network — “pinning” means at least one node is committed to keeping your bytes available. Visitors don’t fetch from a peer swarm: they hit a gateway that resolves your CID and serves it over HTTPS with caching, like a normal static host. The content-addressed layer underneath is what makes the pin replaceable — ours is one pin of your CID, not the only possible one.

What happens when you leave (or we do)

Anonymous drops are claimable for 4 hours; claiming is free and keeps the site up. Claimed projects that lapse eventually stop being pinned by us — but the CID stays valid. Re-pinning your site elsewhere is three steps:

Copy your CID (shown on your project).
Add it to any IPFS pinning service or your own node (ipfs pin add <cid>).
Point your domain (or share the new gateway URL) at the same CID.

That’s the whole exit. Compare: when a conventional host suspends you, the URL is gone and the files with it.

Custom domains

Add your domain in the project’s Domains tab and Stasho gives you a short list of DNS records to create: a CNAME for the host plus two helper records (one proves you control the domain, one tells the gateway which content to serve). Once they resolve, your domain serves the site over HTTPS, and every redeploy follows the domain automatically — the records never need touching again, because they point at your project, not at a specific version.

Honest trade-offs

Cold fetches can be slower than a CDN. Cached pages are comparable to conventional static hosts: 56–70 ms to first byte, measured from the same connection that clocked Netlify’s own site at ~59 ms and GitHub Pages at ~23 ms (medians of 5 runs, single vantage, 2026-08-16). The first fetch of never-served content took 5.5–6.4 s in the same runs — after that, caches hold it.
Static sites. Stasho serves static output — no server-side rendering at request time.
A pin is a commitment, not a law of physics. “Permanent” marketing around content addressing oversells it: a CID is forever, but bytes stay retrievable only while someone pins them. Our claim is narrower and testable — while your project is active we pin it, and if you leave, the same CID works anywhere else.