EC2 Micro Instance as a Remote Bittorrent Client | Hacker News Reader

EC2 Micro Instance as a Remote Bittorrent Client

mwmanning.com

51 pointsnirmal30 comments

The only thing I would ever use this for would be legal files shared with friends - I'm not sure how often Amazon ripples their IP addresses, but I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would have a field day with an IP address linked to a billing account in the US.

Use a prepaid credit card; use a payphone for the phone call confirmation.

sounds like a lot of work to just get around buying content :)

Most of the content that is worth pirating can't be brought at all. Many US tv shows are two or more years behind outside the US.

I would have killed for this when living on campus.

Ouch. What would that cost for the bandwidth?

I looked into using cloud instances for file sharing (legal files, of course) and decided it would cost too much for what it was worth to me.

Yeah, with the free usage tier you get 30GB data transfer (15GB in + 15GB out) included but that would soon run out.

From what I see Data Transfer is $0.10 per GB in $0.15 out http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Assume you seed 50% more than you use 1GB (10c in) + (15c * 1.5 seeding) + (15c download) = ~47.5 cents per GB ouch.

However, a blue ray rip is something like 8.5GB * 47.5 cents = 4.04$ which is not that bad. Assuming you get the actual content that you want, don't end up in jail etc, it’s still cheaper than HD PPV let alone buying the Disk.

Edit: I chose a BR rip as the lowest value content per GB, for most other uses it seems fairly reasonable.

Agreed, it's hard to understand this making any financial sense. If you're looking to do substantial seeding there are low cost unlimited bandwidth vps' that specialize there. If you're simply looking for a delayed but fast torrent download there are services that essentially transfer torrents to files on their server for you to download. And if you simply want to download things fast & on demand, there is always nntp.

Imagine if someone failed to set a max seeding amount and forgot about their EC2 instance for a few days or weeks. It'd be easy to transfer hundreds or thousands of gigabytes (1TB out = $150)

AWS is one of the most expensive ways to buy bandwidth out there. To do worse you have to look at high end dedicated & managed colos and bad deals at big CDNs.

> If you're simply looking for a delayed but fast torrent download there are services that essentially transfer torrents to files on their server for you to download.

Do you have a links to any services like that? The fact that I couldn't find any is why I decided to try this at all.

http://www.furk.net/

http://www.peerharbor.com/

I haven't used these services and can't vouch etc. etc.

(It's notable that two others I was thinking of, httptorrents.com and imageshack.us have either gone out of business or have cancelled the service. So predictably it's a pretty spotty market).

And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?

Thanks.

> And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?

Of course :)

Don't forget these are just today's prices. These costs are dropping a couple times a year, and presumably dropping at a faster rate than your cable internet bill (which is probably rising).

There will absolutely come a point in the future when it will be cheaper to download and store all your files in the cloud, and keep them in the cloud rather than download and store locally.

If you want to share files, an EC2 instance is overkill. Instead you should use S3. It even comes with built in automatic free bittorrent to spread your load.

I'm surprised home routers don't have bittorrent clients built in. I expect most people leave them on 24/7 as it is.

There's a number that do... and apparently you can install transmission as an add-on to dd-wrt:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Optware#Installing_torr...

OpenWRT http://openwrt.org/ also has a number of clients (and even a tracker) ready to be installed in the repository:

  # opkg list | grep -i torrent
  btpd - 0.15-1 - BTPD is a bittorrent client consisting of a daemon and client commands,
   The daemon is capable of running several torrents simultaneously and only uses one tcp port. 
  cbtt - 20060727-1 - Bittorrent tracker
  cbtt-mysql - 20060727-1 - Bittorrent tracker (with mysql support)
  ctorrent - dnh3.3.2-5 - CTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in the C programming language,
  ctorrent-nossl - dnh3.3.2-5 - CTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in the C programming language,
  libtorrent - 0.12.6_r1130-3 - LibTorrent is a BitTorrent library written in C++ for *nix, with a focus
  rtorrent - 0.8.6_r1130-1 - rTorrent is a BitTorrent client for ncurses, using the libtorrent library.
  transmission-daemon - 1.92-1 - Transmission is a simple BitTorrent client.

That's cool.

I did the same thing for Minecraft SMP (passing 512M instead of 1024M for memory usage).

This is cool, you could also use S3 to help you seed if you don't want to keep your computer on all the time. S3 allows you to use torrents by adding ?torrent to the end of your urls. The data transfer is treated the same as regular S3 data access.

Using S3 torrents wouldn't help you seed, since you'd have to use the same tracker (original) as everyone else.

Couldn't you just add the tracker url from the s3 torrent to the torrent file you generate?

Sure, but you then need to get everyone else downloading the (original) torrent to download and use your new torrent. The new amazon torrent might split the file into differently sized chunks compared to the original. In short, you'd need to get all original downloads/uploaded to use your new torrent.

Your safest and cheapest bet is to get a seedbox in France. http://dediseedbox.com

Interesting. I wonder how they make it so cheap, especially considering the traffic.

But making all of their payments non-refundable and reserving the right to terminate your account for any reason (including posting "defamatory" comments online about them!).

See their Terms of Service at http://dediseedbox.com/clients/knowledgebase.php?action=disp...

Another pretty well-known seedbox hoster is Xirvik ( http://www.xirvik.com/ ). I'm pretty sure such services are cheap compared to the crazy bandwidth costs you'd pay with Amazon.

This is a cool idea, but if I used it with the amount of data I use at home, I would be spending upwards of $500 a month.

recently discovered aria2c, it's an excellent client for bittorrents files, would be run great on any EC2 instance.

IMHO, Exactly this kind of abuse is something will lead to closing evaluation period provider by amazon.

How does this constitute abuse?

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