
How To Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent - mqt
http://negatendo.net/blog/2009/01/17/howto-use-amazon-ec2-for-bittorrent/
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drewcrawford
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.

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

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a-priori
So does Amazon...

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tsetse-fly
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....](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/index.html?S3Torrent.html)

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a-priori
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.

~~~
tsetse-fly
Yes, but what does that have to do with prohibiting BitTorrent and IRC?

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

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PStamatiou
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...](http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/12/how-to-download-with-newsgroups)

~~~
marvin
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.

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kylec
> 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.

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Zev
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.

~~~
kylec
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.

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

The potential for legal trouble is just too big.

~~~
tsetse-fly
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.

~~~
mixmax
Good point!

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FiReaNG3L
Why EC2, why not a Dreamhost account? They have tons of bandwith, after all.

~~~
tsetse-fly
Dreamhost blocks BitTorrent usage on their servers.

[http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-
bittorren...](http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-bittorrent/)

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

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shergill
The "cloud" fascination is reaching absurd levels

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old-gregg
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.

~~~
shergill
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?

