YouServ?: A Web-Hosting and Content Sharing Tool for the Masses

Roberto J. Bayardo Jr. and Rakesh Agrawal and Daniel Gruhl and Amit Somani
WWW '02: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web

Overview

YouServ? is a personal webserver as an alternative to paid web hosting services. YouServ? is capable to deal with firewalls, dynamic IP address assignment and limited machine uptime.

YouServ? consists of 3 components: peer nodes, a dynamic DNS server and a YouServ? Coordinator which is a centralized component. Every peer node has an own domain name and the content served can be accessed using a standard web browser. Whenever a node comes online it contacts the YouServ? Coordinator and authenticates itself, the coordinator then updates the DNS record in the DNS server.

A peer can make agreements with other peers to serve a replica of their content while they are offline. When going offline the coordinator will check if peers with which agreements are made are willing and available to serve a replica. If so then the coordinator updates the DNS record accordingly.

Every peer also serves as a proxy server for other peers which are unable to accept incoming connections due to firewalls, VPNs, NATs etc. Matchmaking is performed by the coordinator.