Sidepodcast

Following up on an earlier post relating to torrent support at Sidepodcast, I figured it might make sense, having covered the reasons for using peer-to-peer technology, to also look at how it works from a user perspective.

Within the past couple of weeks, links to torrent files have been appearing all over this site. You’ll find them beside episode names within the archive pages, in the small panel to the right of audio shows and beneath the transport controls in videos.

In order to use these .torrent files, you’ll need some client software and recently we’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Vuze. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems and it’s free to download from the homepage.

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We talked briefly on last weeks show about some minor issues we’ve had recently in regards to our bandwidth costs. If you managed to get to the end of that episode we mentioned a spike in traffic led our hosting company, Media Temple, to warn us we could be looking at a bill for $350+ at the end of the month, and then the traffic spiked yet further.

The Price of Fish

As you can imagine, there’s no way we could afford those kind of costs once, let alone on an ongoing basis. The hosting company includes in their grid-service, one terabyte of bandwidth per month and until now that’s suited us just fine. Anything over that though gets billed at more than two dollars per gigabyte and in July we shifted almost double our allocation.

Media Temple do a sterling job of providing us with solid web hosting, the kind that lets us handle 1,600 comments per thread without blinking, but they never claimed to offer infinite bandwidth.

We’ve obviously been testing out a bunch of alternate solutions and amongst them is Amazon S3, which in truth has been a little unreliable of late, but does offer unlimited bandwidth (although it is expensive). More importantly though, S3 acts as a tracker for torrent files as well as a permanent seeder and this is where things get interesting.

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