Filesharing Software → How much does a small private Torrent site cost to run?

I have been using a private tracker for a while, and while I like their selection and performance is good, they have become insufferable with the begging. Every day, a new 1-page plea for cash. They've threatened to shut down a number of times unless an unspecified dollar amount is donated.

Which to me exacerbates the annoyance factor. They include a bar graph every month supposedly indicating how close to the monthly goal they are, without saying what that is. So even if you did want to kick them $20, you don't know if that's 1% or 10% of the need. And since my ratio is usually in the 8-12 range using bandwidth I already pay for, I feel I am contributing already. When I seed something, it's with 2VPS systems each set to 70Mb up.

What would it theoretically cost? The site itself can't use a whole lot of bandwidth or disk space in the modern sense of things. I don't see a whole lot of expenses. Am I wrong in this? I am getting the sense that it's pleas for beer money, not operations.

It's not the hosting, really, though that can get pricey due to the problem of finding hosts that are either friendly or will look the other way.

They are spending money to get the content to you quicker. »torrentfreak.com/private ··· -091214/

Why not just switch to a different tracker? You can make a small, one-time donation to get into IPTorrents. I consider it the "Walmart" of private trackers. People like to trash it, but I've tried lots of different general trackers, and if I could only use one, it would be IPTorrents due to its vast selection and decent speeds.

Alternatively, torrent-invites.com

The hosting is dirt cheap and running a site like that is probably dirt cheap as well. It's the legal issues behind running the site that make it difficult.

To host an application such as a torrent tracker is not quite the same as setting up a free AOL homepage.

-collocation? dedicated? virtual?
-bandwidth? redundancy? location of data center?
-registered domain? number of IPs? security?
-customer service?
-legal? accounting? admin?

And....the only thing you added to the discussion was some unwelcome, and unneeded sarcasm.

from my understanding the bandwidth usage is pretty high, which does usually bounce their servers into the higher tiers.

that said i have the asked the same thing, you never get a clear answer

that said these ultra high speed seedbox's make it harder to get your ratio up, if your not on a seedbox

He added some reality. Torrent sites aren't something you just "spin up". Not unless you're ready for legal teams to sue your ass into the grave. Read the post again and you'll see that there are some actual real concerns. Any site that does actually have any kind of success is going to run a huge server load and will end up getting expensive.

Wrong.

I acknowledged in post number one that I knew they cost money. My initial estimate being in the $200-2,000 a month type affair.

Nobody was suggesting that a private tracker was similar to a free AOL site. Nobody at all.

huge server load? i believe i read the pirate bay runs on 7 servers, that does not seem that large, for one of the biggest trackers on the net

there was also another thread that indicated demonii.com which is a huge tracker used by PB was running on a single PIII 500 mhz system.... by a home user.

It's one of those situations where if you have to ask, you're already in over your head.

And when some people don't know, they just say so.

Let me clue you in on what I do for a living. I'm a sys-admin for some of the most expensive systems you can buy. These systems have CPUs stored in them via trays. Cores by the hundreds. Most of them have four trays of peripherals. Each of these servers have more memory in them than you have in hard drive space (6TB+). The servers are a size of a closet. Then, we stack each of these servers side by side in an aisle. Then, we have these aisles lined up like you were at a grocery store. Each of those servers cost anywhere from $250k to $1m.

You cannot fathom what runs on those servers that I help maintain. State and national government data. Medical data and processing on millions of people. Bank processing for trillions of dollars in transactions yearly.

I think I know what it takes to run a silly little torrent website.

So let's start off with the basics. I would recommend working on your RHCE. You'll want to run your systems on Linux. It's generally more secure and it's faster, especially when you're going to run a load balancer if your site gets even remotely off the ground. Not sure where to start? Amazon has some books on how to get your RHCE and it should teach you basic administration tasks on Linux. Once you get your RHCE, you may want to brush up on SELinux and some networking.

You'll also want to look into various data center providers. Cloud based? Amazon has a cloud you could spin up with. You'll then want to learn some web programming. Python, SQL, HTML5, CSS, maybe some javascript or PHP. You should be able to code a site with those.

But before you host, you can develop your site locally. Grab yourself a ISO of Ubuntu online and load it into Oracle Virtualbox so you can run your development environment in a sandbox.

So you've written your website and you're ready to release to the world. You figured out how to spin up some other servers that can act as load balancers when you get pummeled with http requests. You figured out how to handle all the various DDoS attacks that come with owning a pirate website. You figured out how to secure the shit out of your linux box using some of the strictest SELinux contexts in addition to locking apache down like fort knox.

After all of that, you have to solve the biggest hurdle of them all: Dodging one of the most successful and ruthless lobbying firms in the world. The MPAA/RIAA collective. They've infiltrated every government in the world. You're a first world citizen so you'll need to proxy your website through 15 different people just to hope that shit doesn't trace back to you. Funnel your revenue and costs through nigerian princes who you pay in bitcoin to fund your website. Then, once the authorities figure out that you're running a rampant torrent site, full of all sorts of pirated stuff, they're going to send a swat team in, shove a flashbang up your ass, and send you to prison for the next two dozen years.

So when I tell you that you're in over your head, it's because you're in over your head. Torrent sites are constantly getting hunted down and shut down. Those that don't pay attention to the courtesy shutdown notice get raided and have their lives destroyed.

But please, continue. I'm sure if you wait long enough, someone will come along and give you a one-click solution that automatically spins up a torrent website and gives you everything your heart desires... Just keep waiting.

Or you can continue to trash the only real advice you're going to get in this thread, simply because you cannot handle the truth.

I'm sure you worked hard on that wall of text. Why? Who TF knows. You're bored, I guess. So far the advice I have "trashed" in this thread was the advice that a small to medium sized private torrent site wasn't the same as a free AOL page.

Something I knew wasn't the case, which was obvious to anyone reading my first post.

I am not interested in starting my own private bittorrent site. If I were, I would approach it a little differently than a post on DSLR. I was only interested in what the realistic costs might actually be.

Such as hosting $$, bandwidth $$, administrative costs, any hardware (if any).

Someone posted an interesting article about it. Alas it's from 2009 though. Server/bandwidth costs dramatically less now than then.

The legal costs sound like a total crapshoot, and probably difficult to estimate. Maybe zero for site one, the moon for site two.

If you don't want to add anything to that, then don't.

Or another option would be you can't fathom that someone might not agree with you.

Large scale server support doesn't make you an expert at the question be posed here. If it did I would be a friggin genuis.

and small torrent sites would not fall under enterprise, nor would their infrastructure, your not the only guy who works enterprise .this is aimed at Archivis,

Sorry if the AOL reference offended, really I could have used any free home page host as a reference. Sarcasm aside, 3rd party hosted application servers all have a few common variables associated with cost, which I mentioned. Also, a torrent tracker with links to questionable content, may incur additional cost, part of playing hide and seek or whack a mole. Even if the account can't be traced back to anyone, accounts getting terminated without refund does come to mind.

All in all, they think they are justified in nagging for money, since the cost is real. I don't torrent, but I can see why they would feel justified, it seems like a lot of work.

The one I usually use has ~35,000 users, and currently ~40,500 torrents active. Their server costs as of 4 days ago were about 130 Euros a month.

My experience from a couple others over the years, there are more than a couple that are in constant "we're about to die throw us all your money" mode, that they're either blowing on stupid crap, or pocketing themselves.