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How To Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent
- mixmax 18y agoMy guess is that Amazon will put a stop to this before too long. The potential for legal trouble is just too big.
- dennmart 18y agoThe article does point out that Amazon's Terms of Service disallow any piracy activity that may occur. So if anyone tries to use this for illegal purposes, they won't be up for long.
- tsetse-fly 18y agoI don't think so. Amazon is protected by DMCA Safe Harbor provisions and doesn't have to act until they've received notice of copyright infringement on their servers. There are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent, I don't see Amazon putting an outright ban on torrent usage on their servers. It limits their usefulness as a generic hosting provider to only allow certain types of traffic.
- mixmax 18y agoGood point!
- FiReaNG3L 18y agoWhy EC2, why not a Dreamhost account? They have tons of bandwith, after all.
- tsetse-fly 18y agoDreamhost blocks BitTorrent usage on their servers. http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-bittorrent/ http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-bittorren...
- drewcrawford 18y agoEC2 is overkill for leeching (or even seeding) a few torrents. If you want more bandwidth just find some crappy $5 VPS server somewhere (lowendbox reviews a steady stream of cheap hosting) and install torrentflux.
- wmf 18y agoI get the impression that most VPS providers ban BitTorrent and IRC.
- a-priori 18y agoSo does Amazon...
- tsetse-fly 18y agoWhere did you hear that? Amazon Web Services does not ban BitTorrent or IRC. They actually support BT as an official delivery method from S3. http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/index.html?S3Torrent.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/index....
- a-priori 18y agoI was referring to the passage in the article which reads (emphasis mine): 'Distributes, shares, or facilitates the distribution of unauthorized data, malware, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, or other malicious or harmful code (collectively, “Harmful Components”).' I took that to include copyrighted data, including Battlestar Galactica episodes.
- tsetse-fly 18y agoYes, but what does that have to do with prohibiting BitTorrent and IRC?
- wmf 18y ago
- kylec 18y ago> I also pay only for what I use - which by my estimates will hopefully be less than $30 per month (real data to follow) Last I checked EC2 was around $70/month minimum just to have your instance running, so unless he plans on manually turning his instance off when he's not using it (which would equate to about half the time) he's going to be spending $70 + bandwidth. I was actually hoping this would be an article about using EC2 instances as trackers and seeders for distributing your own material as opposed to some lame attempt at piracy.
- Zev 18y agoThere's a Webseed extension to Bittorrent that allows you to seed a torrent off a webserver: see http://www.bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt http://www.bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt . It shouldn't be too hard to set up on an EC2 instance if you needed to do so.
- kylec 18y agoI didn't assume that it would be technically difficult, but I thought that an article that took into consideration Amazon's architecture to make a horizontally scalable BitTorrent tracker/seed for high-volume high-availability transfers would be an interesting read.
- seiji 18y agoNo EC2 needed. From the S3 docs: "Any publicly available data in Amazon S3 can be downloaded via the BitTorrent protocol, in addition to the default client/server delivery mechanism. Simply add the ?torrent parameter at the end of your GET request... "
- shergill 18y agoThe "cloud" fascination is reaching absurd levels
- old-gregg 18y agoHa, I find this case to be an exception - to me, browser-based photo editor sitting in "the cloud" sounds more absurd than keeping your Torrent server there. I run my torrents off Slicehost. It's been awesome. This is what "cloud" is supposed to be doing.
- shergill 18y agoso you pay $20/month so you can run bittorent on a dedicated computer without hogging down your own network + machine? That doesn't sound too bad. Is it a pain to transfer the files back to local computer though?
- PStamatiou 18y agoThis is too much work for keeping your ratio all nice and swell. Start using newsgroups. You pay a bit and get insanely fast downloads (maxes out my fiber line around 9-10MB/sec). http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-newsgroups http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-new...
- marvin 18y agoWhere is the best Usenet index these days? Newzbin doesn't accept new memberships and the other services I found half a year ago were terribly sketchy in their coverage. I just concluded that Usenet wasn't an option for me any longer.
- froo 18y agoi've started using ec2 for rendering 3D animations. Much cheaper than investing in a renderfarm for the moment.