How To Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent | Hacker News Reader

How To Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent

negatendo.net

26 pointsmqt24 comments

EC2 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.

I get the impression that most VPS providers ban BitTorrent and IRC.

That may be true for shared hosting, but not for VPS.

The entire point of having a VPS is that you're guaranteed a slice of the server to do what you want. If your provider is somehow monitoring your processes, sniffing your traffic, and setting restrictions on your applications, then I would find another one.

So does Amazon...

Where 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....

I 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.

Yes, but what does that have to do with prohibiting BitTorrent and IRC?

Obviously a-priori is obliquely making the point that BitTorrent is mostly used for copyright infringement.

This 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-new...

Where 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.

> 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.

No 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... "

There'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 . It shouldn't be too hard to set up on an EC2 instance if you needed to do so.

I 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.

My guess is that Amazon will put a stop to this before too long.

The potential for legal trouble is just too big.

I 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.

Good point!

The 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.

Why EC2, why not a Dreamhost account? They have tons of bandwith, after all.

Dreamhost blocks BitTorrent usage on their servers.

http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-bittorren...

i've started using ec2 for rendering 3D animations. Much cheaper than investing in a renderfarm for the moment.

The "cloud" fascination is reaching absurd levels

Ha, 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.

so 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?

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