Sites

A site is a static website stored on IOTA Storage, indexed by an object in your IOTA wallet and reachable through a subdomain or an IOTA Names name.

• Files. Each file of the site is a patch of a quilt: a blob owned by you and paid in IOTA, like any other.
• Index. A Site object in your wallet (package sitios) has one Resource per path, with the file's HTTP headers, the blob ID of its quilt, the patch (x-quilt-patch-internal-id header) and its SHA-256.
• Configuration. An optional ws-resources.json file in the site folder sets headers, routes, redirects, the site name and its metadata.

You publish and manage sites with the app or with the reference CLI.

How a site is served

The portal serves every Site of the sitios package at two kinds of address:

Address	Example
https://<site ID in base36>.iotastorage.com/<path>	The Site ID 0x… written in base36.
https://<name>.iotastorage.com/<path>	https://blog.alice.iotastorage.com/ serves the site that the IOTA Names name blog.alice.iota points to. See IOTA Names.

The base36 form is the 32 bytes of the object ID written in base 36 (each leading zero byte is a 0). The app shows the URL of each site, and the CLI converts in both directions with node sitio.mjs convertir.

How the portal resolves a path

For each request, the portal reads the Site and the resource of the path from IOTA, in a single query, and then tries, in this order:

1. The resource of the path. / is /index.html, and a trailing slash is removed.
2. <path>/index.html, if the path has no extension. So /docs/ and /docs serve /docs/index.html.
3. A redirect of the site that matches the path: answers with its status (301, 302, 303, 307 or 308) and a Location header.
4. A route of the site that matches the path: serves the resource it points to.
5. The site's /404.html, with status 404.
6. Otherwise, the portal's own "Page not found" page, with status 404.

The bytes come from the aggregator: the patch of the quilt, by its quilt patch ID. Before serving them, the portal checks that their SHA-256 is the one the Site declares on IOTA.

Responses

A served resource carries the headers stored in its Resource (headers that are not valid in HTTP are not sent), plus:

• x-resource-iota-object-id and x-resource-iota-object-version: the dynamic field that holds the resource;
• x-sitio-iota: the ID of the Site.

The portal only answers GET and HEAD. Errors:

Status	When
400	The address or the path is not valid.
404	No site at that address; the name does not exist, expired or does not point to a site; the page does not exist; or the data of the file is no longer available (it expired).
405	A method other than GET or HEAD.
422	The bytes do not have the SHA-256 that the site declares on IOTA.
503	The IOTA node or the aggregator did not respond. Try again later.
508	A redirect of the site points to the same path.

Quilts and costs

• The files to upload are grouped in quilts, from smallest to largest. With 100 shards a quilt holds up to 66 files. Since this network has few columns per quilt, a quilt larger than 1 MiB that would be more than 4 times the size of its files is split in two.
• Each resource is a dynamic field of the Site with its storage deposit: about 0.005 IOTA per file, almost all of it deposit, which comes back to you when you destroy the site.
• On testnet, the example site of the project (6 files) costs about 0.035 IOTA to publish, almost all of it deposit, plus a few thousand nanos of storage.

Expiration

A site is available as long as the blobs of its files are. Each purchase covers at most 53 epochs (53 days on testnet). Renew the site before it expires: see Update, renew and destroy. When a file has expired, the portal answers 404 with a page that says the content is no longer available.