Hi, I run a project called Pylons that lets people upload art to IPFS and sell it. For a few years ipfs.io has been a reliable way to display art to people but in the last few weeks it has become much slower and less reliable. Is this intended? Should I be able to use ipfs.io for end-user images or is it supposed to be necessary for me to run an IPFS node?
It is only intended to be a test server, it’s not for production, never was. However, people use it that way, which is why it has become slow.
There’s no charge for the IPFSio gateway and it’s best effort. If that works for your use case, great.
Otherwise, consider hosting a small server on your own (eg $5/month VPS) or pay one of the many IPFS hosting providers.
You might encourage buyers to add the things they care about to an IPFS Desktop install, then your whole community help keeps it online.
All of those things may still be “slow”, depending on your needs.
OK thank you. I’m happy to use a paid service, is there any sort of list of reputable ones?
I think the IPFS Shipyard team cc @lidel @BigLep @robin should make a list of the companies that sponsor them and/or a referral revenue share.
In the mean time the Awesome IPFS List has some listed GitHub - ipfs/awesome-ipfs: Community list of awesome projects, apps, tools, pinning services and more related to IPFS.