Run by everyone, hosted by no one

A site on Swarm doesn't live on a server. Uploading it splits the files into fixed-size chunks, each addressed by the hash of its own contents, and scatters them across Swarm's shared storage layer, the same layer every other piece of content on the network uses. No single node holds the whole site, and no single node needs to be reachable for someone else to load it; a chunk is served by whichever nodes happen to be holding it.

A root manifest ties the chunks back together: it's the map from a file path like /index.html or /assets/logo.svg to the chunks that hold it, so a single reference is enough to reconstruct the entire site. Uploaded once, that manifest reference would normally be fixed forever — a new version would mean a new, different reference.

A feed makes it possible to update. A feed is a Single Owner Chunk that only the site's owner can write to, holding a pointer to the current manifest. Publishing a new build means writing a new manifest reference to the feed; the feed's own address doesn't change, so a link shared once keeps resolving to whatever the latest version is.

Keeping all of this available costs postage stamps, paid upfront by whoever uploads the site, funding the nodes that store the chunks for the stamp's duration. This replaces a hosting bill: instead of paying a company every month to keep a server running, a stamp pays the network directly, for a duration chosen at upload time and extendable later. For a human-readable address, the feed can be linked to an ENS name, so a hash-based reference resolves from something like yourname.eth instead.