Topic: Web hosting for big torrent site

[pdastoor]

I want to host a big torrent site, lets just say for a big mainstream band or something. I have made up my mind with using vbulletin forum software as i've seen many sites use it and it works great.

Offcourse this would require lots of hardware to run on I assume? Since lots of people will be using the tracker and there will be lots of activity. So should I purchase business web hosting for this kind of stuff, or is the regular ($5.99) webhosting unlimited package good enough for this sort of stuff?

I am currently using http://www.webhostinghub.com/ for my portfolio site, will this webhost (and the features they offer) be fast and good enough for what I am looking for? Or does it all just depend on the forum software?

[rastasean]

I doubt something at $6 a month would work. That's most likely a shared hosting plan which means your account is on a server with other sites and your account would be closely monitored to ensure it doesn't consume too much processing power, RAM or something like that. So that means you would most likely be looking at VPS accounts and dedicated server accounts which can range in price from ~$20/30 and easily exceeding a couple hundred a month depending on the processing power, ram, disk space, data transfer, etc.

 good luck

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

Don't know a thing about hosting but you might want to consider using this as your front end:

http://what.cd/gazelle/

http://www.cotapers.org uses it. Works great. Tons of control.

[pdastoor]

ok so a dedicated server of vps, got that part.

Still confused about monthly bandwidth and storage. Most packages have 3TB-10TB/month bandwidth and 500MB-1TB storage space.

Does that mean that people can only upload/download 3TB of data per month? like as in seed/leech? Is that what the bandwidth is.
As for storage space, torrents are not stored on the server but on users machine so that means storage space is just for forums etc... I think

just need to clear the bandwidth part. How much bandwidth would a site like TTD/Dime use per month, about 10TB?

[rastasean]

what web hosting companies call bandwidth should be called data transfer and that's uploads/downloads/views of your site/anything involving a connection to the site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth__(computing)

Bandwidth in web hosting

In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in gigabytes per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer..

I have no idea how much data transfer any site uses.

[OFOTD]

Keep in mind that you can find cheap hosting with unlimited bandwidth and storage just about anywhere.   Where you will run into problems (other than copyright) is that most shared hosting companies determine your service needs based on CPU use.     Even if your torrent site isn't hosting anything but is being used as a tracker you'll be getting machines pinging the server constantly.   They will suspend first and work out your usage later.  That applies for the vast majority of larger reputable hosts.

On another semi-private/public torrent tracker that hosts concerts the monthly bill appears to be around $160.     You may want to consider a dedicated server where you don't have to worry about CPU usage.

[sparkey]

www.estreet.com is a locally owned Denver ISP.  I'd give them a call to see what their rates are.  Good people.

[pdastoor]

thanks for the suggestions, im looking more at a canadian provider since we don't have DMCA in canada and wouldn't worry about any copyright issues, not that we would be hosting any illegal content in the first place, just torrents from a taper friendly band

[JMFanDotCom]

I actually host JMFan.com -- it's a very simple site where you can download the .torrent file, and see a catalog (and list of changes) in the archive.

I own my own server, and my bill for hosting is about $200/month.  I'm also located in Canada.  For that $200 a month, I get 24/7 power and connectivity guarantee.  Most 'colocation' ISPs will give you a particular number of 'megabits' of usage.  I get 3 megabits, which means I can serve 300kilobytes/sec upload 24x7x365.  Each additional megabit is in the range of $60/month, but the price of bandwidth is falling regularly.

The advantage to the datacenter is that there's no per-gigabyte cap for bandwidth the same way there is for residential ISPs.  Most ISPs top out at 60 or 100GB -- after which you pay a usurious rate like $1/GB.