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Setting up "official" torrents for free stuff

DSmolken

Senior Member
I'm trying to set up more efficient hosting for the free stuff I've made, and calculated that it eats up about 10 TB of traffic per month. Unlimited cheap hosting plans won't really work for that, because they'll slow the transfers down to the point where that 10 TB would take several months for users to download.

Now, the stuff that's open source is also on GitHub so I suppose I could just use that as the primary download location, but it's not all open source. Plus there are a couple of KVRDC entries, which involves promising they will stay free forever, so I can't just go "OK, they're $5 now" and get around the problem that way. How would I go about setting up torrent links a la Ivy Audio, and decentralizing at least part of the hosting?

Are there any things I should be aware of, like if there's an appealing torrent link people can try to upload fakes and make that link point to their own content? I know there's already pirated versions of some of these free libraries (people do pirate free stuff, which then won't work in non-pirated version of Sforzando, so it is a problem for users) out there, too, so is there a way to make sure my link will not have a risk of giving somebody a pirate version download?
 
I don't think what you're asking about re: pirating is possible with torrents due to the hashing of the files. It won't upload files if the hash doesn't match, so there isn't a way for a torrent you offer to lead to anything but the files it was made for.

You should be able to use any torrenting client to make the file, I like qBittorrent. I'd have a link to the client alongside the torrent link on your website, as some people might not be aware and/or think that torrents are only for pirating.

My only other thought is to maybe look into getting a seedbox. Don't have any recommendations there but it's more efficient than leaving your own computer on 24/7, as there's always a chance that if your client isn't connected nobody will be able to download if there aren't any other peers.
 
Thanks, very helpful! I'll see if we could use the current hosting to get the seeding started, and promise to move out in like June or something.
 
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