

Seeding torrents from S3 - celingest
http://blog.celingest.com/en/2014/03/20/seeding-torrents-s3/?media=HNrgr6may

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dublinben
This is probably an incredibly expensive way to seed torrents. There are any
number of seedbox providers who will give you several hundred GB of storage,
several TB of traffic, and much higher speeds for a flat rate of ~$15 a month.

------
aroch

        The upload speed for S3 seeding was usually between 72 and 80 KiB per second
    

So not horribly helpful for larger blobs that you expect to have a lot of
initial demand for. You'd be better off serving the blob or renting a seedbox
/ cheap server if you want to do initial seeding for distribution if you were
interested in your users experience.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The benefit isn't in serving the data from S3. The benefit is that S3 is an
indestructible tracker. If you remove public-read from an object, S3 will
continue to serve as the tracker for the object for the swarm.

~~~
mikeash
Providing an extra seed seems useful too. You can do the initial seed from
somewhere faster, but S3 will provide a backstop in case that seed goes down.
It might be too slow for the full download, but it can help fill in the last
little pieces in case you get into a situation where everybody in the swarm
has 99% of the file but nobody has some particular chunks.

~~~
toomuchtodo
CORRECTION: It was pointed out by /u/teraflop that the Bittorrent
functionality and Requestor Pays functionality are incompatible on the same
bucket.

Indeed. S3 also has the ability to have the requestor pay for the bandwidth
costs of a object retrieval. You could, for example, get the object free from
the swarm, and pay for the last few MB/GB if it was unavailable from anyone
else.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/RequesterPays...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/RequesterPaysBuckets.html)

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonDevPay/latest/DevPayDevelop...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonDevPay/latest/DevPayDeveloperGuide/S3RequesterPays.html)

~~~
teraflop
"Requester Pays buckets do not support the following. [...] BitTorrent"

~~~
toomuchtodo
Corrected and cited. Thanks.

~~~
mikeash
I didn't know about the requestor pays functionality, so it's good to know
that even if it doesn't apply here.

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profquail
Another idea: you could also use S3 as a web seed for a .torrent you hosted
somewhere (or even a magnet link); it seems likely the speeds would be much
better as well, since you'd be able to take advantage of S3's load-balancing.

~~~
mappu
+1 for web seeds. You can also avoid having a tracker at all if you use PEX
and DHT-only magnet links.

Tangent: I ran into a strange bug with web seeds using Transmission on Debian
Wheezy the other day: it does not respect the configured speed limit for web
seed sources, owing to a discrepancy in the way libcurl vs libtransmission
downloads are handled. It's fixed now but not in Wheezy.

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antr
Quick question: is anyone here using BT Sync with S3? I'd like to know about
the experience, ease of use, access, redundancy, etc.

~~~
scott_karana
I might be wrong, but I don't think Bittorrent Sync uses the same data or
tracker protocols, so S3 wouldn't support it.

I'm sure plenty of people use it on their EC2 instances though.

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teepo
Why? This would work... until the surprise bandwidth bill comes in.You could
just do this for free using dropbox though, or another less expensive object
storage.

[https://sites.google.com/site/torrenttricks/use-dropbox-
as-a...](https://sites.google.com/site/torrenttricks/use-dropbox-as-a-free-
webseed-for-your-torrents)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Dropbox is going to cut you off much faster than S3 if you're attempting to
serve torrents from them.

~~~
Robadob
I've heard of dropbox cutting off high traffic files a couple of times, anyone
have the specifics on what constitutes high traffic though?

~~~
pdaddyo
[https://www.dropbox.com/help/4204/en](https://www.dropbox.com/help/4204/en)

"For Basic accounts, the total amount of traffic that all of your links
together can generate without getting banned is 20 GB per day. For Pro and
Business accounts, the limit is 200 GB per day."

~~~
toomuchtodo
So $2.50 worth of S3 outbound transfer (for personal accounts).

