The biggest issue you’d have with using Tardigrade as a file store for public, hot content is that it’s unlikely to actually save money on transfer fees. This is because there is no public HTTP endpoint that serves files from Tardigrade (as far as I know), so anyone wanting to use it as a host for publicly-downloadable content needs to stand up a proxy server that fetches the data from Tardigrade and then serves it to the downloader.
This server would obviously need enough resources to handle whatever scale of downloads it needs to, and there would likely be additional egress charges from whatever hosting service provides the server. You’d be paying for egress twice.
If one can require JavaScript to download content then this could work by running a Tardigrade client directly in the browser, though I don’t think this is an option yet (it is under development).
So Tardigrade basically has a subset of S3-type use cases. There is no “static web hosting” option like on S3, so it’s limited to circumstances under which you want to store massive amounts of data and fetch it yourself – data warehouse, backup, and archival workloads would be the most fitting, I imagine.
I fear we won’t see the lucrative “egress-hungry” type of workloads unless Storj sets up some HTTP servers for hosting static content, or some of the popular CDNs (CloudFront, Fastly, etc.) offer a Tardigrade integration.
The point is this is not a ready-to-use service that people/companies can rely on. It needs to be planned for as an infrastructure component, and paid for (hosting and egress).
I really think CDN integrations would help Tardigrade to take off. That would make a totally hands-off solution for service operators who could focus their energy elsewhere.
I agree with @cdhowie that this is not a good solution. If I need to host a proxy to share a file, there’s no point in using tardigrade for that. I can just host the file myself.
Additionally a decentralized, highly available storage makes no sense if I still have to use my own infrastructure to serve a file.
Tardigrade needs to be able to make publicly shared files available from everywhere without a proxy, probably possible by having a javascript client that runs in the browser.
This is being looked at internally, but probably won’t be part of the product soon. It’s quite challenging, but I think they have a decent path through most of those challenges. Read what JT said about it here.