Torrents

S

SeaCastle

Member
I have two questions about Torrents in general:

1. If I wanted to put a file on my website (temporarily or permanently) could I make a torrent file out of the file I have, put the .torrent file on my website (without physically having the file on my website) and have people download it via torrent and work, or do I need a program like xbtit and have a tracker? Do I need a tracker?

2. If somebody does download a torrent, does it count towards my bandwith or is it separate?
 
Can't help with the first but you would have to have the means of making a torrent file and linked to something I would think. I don't think it would work just from (say) a torrent file made with Azureus as there has to be a tracker in there somewhere, I think.
Interesting thought though.
If the person is downloading the file from you (as with seeding a Mousebits file) and you are seeding it, that would count towards your bandwidth as it's being transmitted over your connection (unless the file was held elsewhere but then you'd just put a link to it's location, wouldn't you?).
Anything that goes via your connection is counted.
I am looking forward to the tech guys answers on this.
 
I beleive you do in fact need a tracker...  You can probably set your machine up as a tracker, but chances are your ISP won't be too happy about that.  SirLamer I think went through a few hosting providers to find one that was tracker friendly.
 
Although Vuze (Azureus) has some ways of sharing files without a tracker, you will need a tracker for those torrent files. It is the tracker (hence the name) that keeps track of the clients that have pieces of the file available. The torrent file merely states how many parts the actual files has and what tracker URL can be used to get client info (among some other things). With a tracker alone, you will get nowhere since you also need clients (seeders) that stay around and actually seed the parts to others that are requesting the parts. When clients just download and leave, your torrent will die (until someone seeds again).

The clients that actually seed are using their bandwidth. The tracker will need some bandwidth too, but that is far less than the download traffic. To get a file out there, someone has to start seeding and use that bandwidth. Once the file is seeding, other clients will participate in seeding (even when they are still downloading remaining parts). But this will only keep working when people leave the file in seeding mode, otherwise the torrent will die and you will need to seed it again.

Fortunately, we at mousebits have a sharing community, with a lot of members that keep files seeded, even when finished downloading. We do have torrents that die every once in a while, but I am pleased with the way things are going at the moment. Other trackers are not as lucky as we are and demand a certain upload ratio to be able to download new torrent, and keep the seeds working.

Hope this clears up some of your questions.

Cheers,
Dajatje
 
Now that leaves me to figure out how to set up a tracker...but I don't know if my hosting people will be too happy. (But I only have 250MB space and 5GB bandwith, which isn't much.)

How would one set up a tracker? Do I need to download and install xbtit, or can I just enter in any URL on my site? (I did see one site with an HTML tracker, if I could call it that:http://waxy.org/bt/)
 
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