Using Bittorrent On Amazon EC2

Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O’Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.

Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.

[via Waxy]

[photo: nrkbeta]

8 thoughts on “Using Bittorrent On Amazon EC2

  1. The costs of running an S3 node 24×7 for a month *start* at $75/mo, not including network traffic or S3 storage, so he must be firing up the node only when he uses it and shutting it down after, and not using it that much. I guess its competitive with commercial seedbox services, but EC2 is *not* cheap.

  2. On the danger of being accused of spamming, I would like to point to furk.net a filehoster with build in torrent support, I think it costs around 10€/month for 60GB of download traffic (torrent trafic is free).
    Apparently they are located in the Netherlands, so DMCA shouldnt be an issue.

    I personally think that ec2 is great, but i tend to use it for more “challenging” tasks than torrents.

  3. Wow this is what i got from AMAZON!!!!!

    Original report:

    * Destination IPs:
    * Destination Ports:
    * Destination URLs:
    * Start Time: 2009-08-16 XXXX
    * End Time: 2009-08-16 XXXX
    * NTP: No
    * Log Extract:
    <<<



    XXXXXX
    Open
    Normal


    Warner Bros. Verified Notice Program
    MediaSentryCopyrightInfringement

    copyright2@mediasentry.com


    Amazon.com, Inc.
    Adrian Garver
    Legal Department 1200 12th Avenue South, Suite 1200 Seattle, WA 98144-2734 US
    (206) 266-4064


    2009-08-16T
    XXXXXXXX
    BitTorrent

    1



    The Hangover
    5F29F7CC78F92EC907E8F2D2021ACDE462B20401

    >>>

    INFRINGEMENT DETAIL
    ——————–

    Infringing Work: The Hangover
    First Found: 16 Aug 2009 XXXX EDT (GMT -0400) Last Found: 16 Aug 2009 XXXX EDT (GMT -0400) IP Address: XXXXXX IP Port: 10985
    Protocol: BitTorrent
    Torrent InfoHash: 5F29F7CC78F92EC907E8F2D2021ACDE462B20401
    Containing file(s):
    The Hangover (2009) DVDSCR-MAXSPEED.torrent (764,463,219 bytes)

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