Pin Sites FAQ

Introduction

Why do I need this?

Pin Sites is a very simple, elegant CMS (Content Management System) You can create any number of websites on it. But, you may ask, there are thousands of web hosting providers nowdays. So why Pin Sites?

Pin Sites is very different. It works totally under your control, at your own computer. There is hardly any work done at our site. Really!

The websites are automatically placed on a CDN and so are stupidly fast from any location on the world (and they say, from inter-planetary space too!) You would need this because it almost completely makes web-hosting a simple chore; instead of the complex process that it is today. It offers both simplicity and sophistication.So you can have your website up and running -- from scratch to a hosted website in a day or less!

Not only you work at your own computer at your own pace, instead of at our website; it gives you lots of power. You can invite any number of team-members to contribute to your website contents; and you can keep the looks of your website separated from the contents quite easily. You can keep changing the contents and keep building a new version of your website. In short, Pin Sites is also an intelligent content management system; all working at your own computer without really being dependent on the speed of our servers!

What is so different here?

Pin Sites works extremely differently from your regular web hosting provider. One crucial difference is that you have simplicity without compromising on the sophistication needed for all kinds of web-hosting requirements.

Unlike other websites, you do not incur any hosting charges whatsoever and you are NOT dependent on the quality of the hosting company. This could be one main reason why you should go for Pin Sites!

You pay ONCE for each website, and a very tiny amount (charged elastically) for the contents being developed for your site.We also charge a tiny one time build fee; when a version of the compiled website is placed on the IPFS cloud.But once a version of the site is finalized there are no charges at all. NO hosting charges, no bandwidth charges, and hence no nasty surprises. So you know exactly what you are paying for.

And all this with practically NO limitations. Our system elegantly keeps the visual look of the website separated from the contents. You can enroll any number of content-writers to post contents for your websites.

Our server plays no key part in the actual hosting process so you are very sure that your website performance is not limited by our own server's performance. This is VERY different from conventional webhosting services. There you would need to spend time and effort figuring out whether the webhosting service actually is competent or not -- because in those services, it would be their servers that are doling out your files to your website visitors.

There is another problem with conventional webhosting: Many use shared hosting. That means your websites performance is actually dependent on what other websites are being hosted along with yours at their hosting server. So you could have a situation where sometimes your site is fast, but sometimes it becomes super slow. Why? Because some other website on the same hosting server as yours is consuming lots of resources. This NEVER happens on sites that are built using Pin SItes, because our technology is completely different: ALL sites built by Pin Sites are pinned on the fault-tolerant, super fast IPFS cloud.

In case of Pin Sites, your website would be permanently pinned on the IPFS cloud directly from your own computer -- and moreover it is guided by Cloudflare's excellent free IPFS gateway. This is a modern, fault tolerant method of handling the Internet. So you are ALWAYS sure that your website would be stupidly fast when accessed from any location! It has ZERO dependencies on other sites, for its performance.

Any site built using Pin Sites is guranteed to be hacker proof. As the hosting is extremely unconventional, there is absolutely no hope in hell for any hacker to overwrite the contents of such sites.

Last but not least: Pin Sites works due to a Windows Client application that you (and your content writers) download and use. So you have full privacy over your contents -- we never come to know what you are developing and how you are going about doing it. All the work happens on your computer and those of your content writers quite privately.

Who can use it? Do I need programming skills?

Anyone can use Pin Sites. Especially those who have absolutely no clue about how the Internet works or have no programming expertise whatsoever

Read my lips: No programming required at all! You are NOT entangled inside the nerdy parts of the Internet. You may be hosting a blog, or a company website or whatever ... and you can use Pin Sites. Just concentrate on developing good contents for your site.

The ONLY "knowledge" you need about the Internet could be that of visual HTML page designing. For that, we have tied up with several companies offering HTML editors. See our documentation, and you can choose the one that meets your requirements. You can offload the designing work to someone you know. You can also offload the content writing work for your website to some specialists too.

Soon our website would also give a list of approved HTML designers and content writers whom you can hire.

What kind of sites can I create?

You can create ALL kinds of websites. Blogs? Sure. Landing pages? Sure! Portfolios? Of course. Company information page? Go ahead! The ONLY sites that you cannot create using Pin Sites would be SaaS (Software As a Service) as they would be applications that need to do actual work on a remote server for all the SaaS users. In fact, for those systems also; you could host the pages that do NOT change on its own Pin Site but keep the actual SaaS on a sub-domain. That is how we host Pin Sites too! The main information about Pin Sites itself has been hosted using Pin Sites but the SaaS part of Pin Sites is hosted separately on a sub-domain; and that does NOT use Pin Sites.

As it is quite easy to re-build a site, don't think that Pin Sites can only be used for sites with static pages. Any current version of such a site would be static. But you can easily rebuild the site, and host it again in a jiffy! So Pin Sites has all the advantages of a multi-user content management system with very little headache!

How does "Pin Sites" work ?

Pin Sites works very differently from regular web hosting services. We actually DO NOT carry your website on any of our servers. So you can be rest assured that the performance of your website is actually NOT dependent on who we are, and how powerful our servers are. In short, we only facilitate the correct functionality of a new kind of website hosting system and we do NOT make money because of your contents or the space your contents takes up on our servers or the amount of bandwidth your contents consume.

All websites that Pin Sites facilitates uses a very smart, modern P2P technology called IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) The authors of that open-source system has been successful in "floating" a free "cloud" inside the Internet that is actually accessible from anywhere. The authors decided to call it "inter planetary" because it is so robust that when the world would see people on Mars, the cloud would be accessible even from there! That is called super-confidence!

Why was this kind of websites not seen before? You may ask! Well the simple answer is that Pin Sites was not available before. That is too presumptuous of us! But seriously, hosting a website on the IPFS cloud is an error prone, intricate exercise where there are many parts that could go wrong. Our system facilitates all those parts so that you can host any number of websites directly from your computer.

So is the website hosted from my comptuer?

No. The website is NOT hosted from your computer. Your computer is used only to prepare and build the site. The site itself is hosted from a new kind of cloud on the Internet called the IPFS (Inter-planetary file system) That is super-fast, does not levy any additional costs and is available from any location on the Internet.

Our downloaded client application that you would use is NOT a hosting system. It is a tiny application to help you collect the contents for your website and build the website; and help launch (it is called "pinning") the website on to the IPFS. It also does all the technical work silently on the DNS management system called DeSec.io (where you would need to take a free account) and other necessary work that would have otherwise got you entangled in technical matters.

Why is "Pin Sites" so low-priced?

As stated earlier; our system stores a very tiny amount of management information for each website that uses our system. So we do not incur any much cost. We charge you only for the functionality of getting your website hosted using the excellent IPFS system. A hardworking nerd can also do what our client application does with about a week of reading, navigating all the various complications of IPFS and cloudflare and DeSec etc.

We have simplified that process considerably and when you use our client application, it has all the smarts to do all the tech work. So we charge a very tiny amount only for the functionality we provide. And never for the size of your website contents, bandwidth, etc.

Size, truly, does not matter to us.

Usage

How do I start?

Just buy a domain name for your site from somewhere; and point that domain to your account at the DNS management from DeSec.io (explained in the documentation); download our tiny client application (Windows 32 bit -- should work on Mac and Linux under Wine too) and you are well on the way!

You should also tell your website designer to use one of the HTML editors we have tied up with. Some of them require a download, but some may work online. Your designer should use such HTML editors to design your website and insert "replacement markers" instead of actually writing the contents during the designing itself.

The contents would be written from within our tiny client application you downloaded at the beginning.You can invite any number of content writers to join your site and contribute the contents. Or feel free to develop the entire contents yourself.

Our client application allows you (and any number of content writers you may decide to employ) to post contents for each of your website you decide to host. You can build the design that was made for your website, along with the contents, and our client application would carry out the build process so that your website is hosted correctly. One crucial part of the build process is to dynamically substitute the replacement markers in the design outline with the actual contents you want to go into your website.

Just ensure that you have a suitable domain name. And you have switched its DNS management to the free DeSec.io DNS system; and you have given the DeSec API token inside the client application. The rest will all get done by our client application. Our documentation has more details

Are the hosted sites secure (https)?

Yes. Once you complete a build process using our client application, you can easily go to this Cloudflare IPS gateway page (https://www.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ ) and give the name of your website domain at the bottom of the page. It will magically turn your website into an https:// (secure) website. Our client application, uses the excellent free Cloudflare gateway to ensure that your files are available from multiple locations all over the world -- so your website is becomes stupidly fast from anywhere in the world.

How do I design a site?

You can use one of our recommended HTML editors to design your website. They are listed at our website. Many of them contain pre-made templates for you to begin your designing. If you have no knowledge of how a website is to be designed; you can ask someone you know who can help out.

You should instruct the designer NOT to write the contents directly into the design. Instead he/she should only prepare the design outline. It should contain "replacement markers" wherever some contents need to appear. This is explained well in the documentation. There is no rocket science there: So instead of asking the designer to actually write the contents into the design, the designer inserts something like this

[[introduction]]

That is a replacement-marker! Our client applicaiton will then replace that marker with the actual contents which that marker represents. In short, the designing activity is kept separate from the content writing activity.

You should also let such web designers join your site through our client application, which coordinates all this -- because they can take a look at the content that are getting developed for the site.

Technical matters

Why do I need an account at DeSec.io?

All websites that are managed by our client application are server-less. That means, the files of those websites are NOT placed on any central server. Instead, your website files are on the IPFS cloud -- an area on the Internet which is not owned by anyone.

So technically it is impossible for us to verify if anyone is the true owner of a domain name they claim to be the owner of! This situation does not arise when people are using a "hosting provider" to host their website files. Why? Because in those systems, the website files are stored on the service providers servers; and so a system of verification of the rightful owner of the domain can be carried out.

But we use the powerful IPFS system which cannot be controlled by anyone. We do NOT host any of the website files.

Hence to prove ownership domain and also to make sure that the server-less sites you own are properly hosted, we request you to voluntarily use your domain's DNS management via DeSec.

What is DeSec?

DeSec.io is a fantastic, free DNS system. Our client application that does all the server-less hosting for you; has all the internal smarts to update the DNS records at DeSec on your behalf. Updating the DNS records of a domain is crucial for correct IPFS hosting. As you are the one who would need to connect your domain name to DeSec (and not us) you and us are both perfectly assured that nobody else who uses our system would can maliciously redirect your website to somewhere else.

You will have to setup your account at DeSec.io and also get an API token there that you have to enter into our client application. Don't worry. All information that you own at DeSec.io is ALWAYS under your full control; as the API token you provide does not leave the client application. Moreover, you can always see for yourself the DNS records that were added/changed at DeSec.io by our client application.

Our documentation has more details.

How many sites can I host?

As many as you want. NO limitations. Well, it is limited by the amount of hard-disk space on your computer!

How big can a site be?

Theoretically, there are no limits to the size of a site. However, for practical purposes there are some limitations.

For example; ALL the files of the site MUST be in ONE folder itself. These would be CSS, HTML, JS, images, etc. You can have quite a lot of these files but remember that they have to be assembled locally on your computer and then "pinned" into the IPFS cloud . If you happen to have a slow connection, this can take a good amount of time (in which case, you may consider taking your laptop to an Internet cafe or some other place which has got a fast Internet connection, so that the build process is done fast) Another trick would be to never upload any large image files. Instead use one of the many image uploading sites; and refer the image from that site inside your HTML files.

We are working on a method by which you can have multiple sub-domains for each site you create. You can then separate your files to separately cater to those separate sub-domains. A future version may have such a capability.

If all files are to be in one folder, won't this be a problem for designing?

Not really.

All HTML editors/designers can easily adjust their design activity so that they don't have to deal with separate folders. Why? Because it would be the system that they use which handles all the files -- most of the HTML editors have a feature of configuring the folders into which the files that are handled go into. So you can easily configure the editor to place all files into one folder itself.

Will my site contents be stolen by others?

Our tiny client application is well protected. When the contents are being developed using it, you can rest assure that NO CONTENTS would be read by anyone other than you and those you have given permission to. Even we cannot read them!

But once your website is launched, it would be seen by anyone -- so just like any other website; the contents on a public website are available for anyone who can do Ctrl-C. Ctrl-V. All websites when hosted are subject to this. Not just ours.

Can my site get listed at Google, etc?

Yes, of course. Once the site is built, it is immediately available for being indexed by search engines, etc.

Money matters

How do I pay?

Pin SItes can be paid via our simple "Koyns" currency. (Explained below.) The payment is made for each website from within our client application.

What are Koyns?

It is a term we use for the internal currency that our company uses in all our offerings. Think of it like the tokens you purchased as a kid to feed into a video game machine at a game parlour. You fed the tokens into a slot on the machine and played for sometime. To play further, you asked your parent/guardian to buy you more tokens -- and you returned back to put those into the slot. In case of the tools we provide here; you would usually give a "command" to credit your account with the Koyns you purchased.

Koyns work the same way. You can buy any number of Koyns at our payment gateway https://pages.razorpay.com/koyns Our payment gateway accepts most currencies. But final settlements are done in Indian rupees.

I want someone else to pay for the site I am making. How to do that?

It is very easy. Anyone can purchase any number of Koyns from our payment gateway. So you can request the other party to purchase the Koyns you need for the site you are developing for them from our payment gateway at https://pages.razorpay.com/koyns

Once someone make a purchase, in a few seconds you can convert the payment receipt ID to the "Koyn Code" A Koyn Code is like the currency number seen at the bottom of a currency note. It represents the entire value of that note. The conversion is done at this page: https://koyns.limenleap.com

You can use that Koyn code to recharge any site managed by the downloaded client application itself.

Does it cost me to add team members?

Currently we do NOT charge anything additional to add a team member to your site. We do reserve the right to change this policy in the future.

Note that some of the content-writers, or the HTML designer, who may want to join your site may have their own charges. We at Pin Sites or Limen Leap Labs has nothing to do with the financial arrangement you may have with your team members.

Recharging

Whenever the number of Koyns go low for a website, you can easily deposit additional koyns.

You can purchase Koyns from our payment gateway, and then deposit the Koyns to your site account from within the client application which is managing that site.

Pin Sites: Frequently Asked Questions