31 Comments

  1. I have a dedicated server with me with 1500GB transfer limit. If I want to seed some files, which one is cheaper, Amazon or my dedicated server. I have more than 1000 GB bandwidth unused every month on my dedicated.

  2. Kenney: Amazon S3 costs $0.20 per GB of data transferred. You have a huge amount of bandwidth; that would cost $300/month on S3. Most people don’t have anywhere near that; I have 100 GB/month for example. The real advantage of S3 is that it has unlimited storage capacity and bandwidth. An overage would shut-down your hosted web server, but would not shut down S3. The other advantage is that S3 can track and seed a torrent, and most hosted web servers can’t. The big advantage of S3 and torrents is that Amazon S3 is a super-reliable tracker, and you can unshare the file and use basically no bandwidth to share/seed the file (once other clients have it downloaded.)

    For you, with all of that unused bandwidth, you’d have to have a bunch transfer before S3 would make sense for you. I’m not sure if you could use your provider to track/seed a torrent, but you could definitely use it to host the file.

    1. Is it possible to take a file and have Amazon S3 seed for a torrent associated with different tracker. For example I want to seed an ISO for a linux distrobution but they have a tracker up allready how do i add the Amazon s3 location as a seeder

      1. Author

        I know of no way to seed a non-Amazon tracker – the two are tied together within S3.

  3. Hey Carlton,

    I followed your directions last night and emailed my friend the torrent file. He downloaded it and opened it up just fine. I’m sharing it locally and its still on the server. But, nothing would download.

    Is this service down right now?

    Could you help me out?

    Thanks… =/

  4. Make sure you have the ACL setup properly. Can you download the file from S3 using a standard HTTP connection? If you un-shared the file on S3 so you could seed only with your local PC, maybe it’s not connecting to the tracker on S3 properly.

  5. I can download the file from S3 using a standard HTTP connection.

    Can I send you the torrent to see if you can download it? Looking at the details in uTorrent, it seems okay.

    Would you like a screenshot?

    Thanks for replying so quickly… =)

  6. Thanks for this tutorial. I really need to know – is there a way of having your amazon s3 server seed a torrent for mininova/pirate bay? I don’t know how to add trackers to a torrent downloaded from the amazon s3 server. When I try to upload the .torrent file from my amazon s3 server to mininova or piratebay it doesn’t work. Is there a way to do it somehow?

    thanks

  7. ive been looking for something this and im happy i found this site. question though, i can seem to create the torrent file. i keep trying to add the ?torrent at the end of my file and its not working. i enter it into my bittorrent client and it doesnt work, i put the url in my browser and its saying it doesnt exist. can someone help me?

    i just need to figure out how to get the torrent made then i can seed it thru bittorrent right?

    sory, im a total newbie at this… forgive me

  8. Hey Guys, Perhaps you guys can help. I regularly distribute content for people, like music videos of up and coming bands and singers and also low budget films or films that didnt quite make it to the cinema. I need to help these people get recognised by distributing their content. I already use myspace and youtube but the problem Im having is that is it such a pain to upload torrents to each site. I have maybe about 20 a day and submit to about 15 of the top sites. So you can imagine that its a very time consuming job.
    I was wondering if anyone knows of a way I could write all the information 1 time and submit it to all the important sites that way?
    Like a bulk torrent uploader or something like that?
    Does anyone have any Ideas?

    I’d really appreciate it!

    Many Thanks Everyone,

    Darren Starr

  9. Darren: Instead of uploading the torrent file, could you instead provide a link to the torrent to be downloaded (such as the Amazon S3 link above.) That way, you won’t have to upload anything. They download the torrent from S3, their bit torrent client launches, and the download will begin. Would this work or am I missing something?

    1. Carlton, thanks for the reply, I’ve just seen it only 2 years later! haha. Thank You! Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  10. Hi,
    I’m interested in this feature of S3. I’ve been doing some tests. For example, I want to collect stats from the torrent, so I tried editing the .torrent file, adding optional trackers to see if they can collect stats, but it doesn’t seem to work.
    Is there any method to collect stats from the S3 torrents?

    Thanks in advance

  11. Oh, I see.

    But I think that’s not what I’m looking for. I intend to collect the stats through torrent scrape into the DB. Then I’d output the data (seeds/peers, etc) like this:

    http://www.hg-subs.com/index.php?option=com_torrenttrader&Itemid=3

    I’ve been able to collect some data though, using the method I wrote above (editing the torren to use one extra tracker). However, my script is not able to collect those stats.

    Maybe I should try using another tracker.

    Thanks anyway!


  12. Hi, I am new to torrents and fileshare and I want to be a good seeder what do I need to do? Google has been no help, nor has wiki, it talks about what not to do, but is unclear what to do? do I just leave my isp open? do I need to have bt running? please help. no mocking please unless it is truly original.

    1. Here is a high-level overview. First, you need to install a bit torrent client on your computer. That software and your internet connection need to remain active. If you are sharing more than 1 file, place them in a single zip file. For the file you are going to share, use the bit torrent software to generate a .torrent file; this is the small file others will initially download that allows their bit torrent client to connect to your bit torrent client and then download the original file.

      You can “publish” the .torrent file on a tracker or a website if you want it to be publicly available.

      Alternatively, you can create an Amazon S3 account, upload the file to be shared to that account, and then use the steps above to allow others to download it via bit-torrent. Unless you have a huge number of simultaneous downloaders, you may be better off just allowing them to download the file directly using their web browser without requiring them to use bit torrent.

      If you want more details, do a google search on “how to seed a torrent”.

  13. Thanks for this tutorial. I really need to know – is there a way of having your amazon s3 server seed a torrent for mininova/pirate bay? I don’t know how to add trackers to a torrent downloaded from the amazon s3 server. When I try to upload the .torrent file from my amazon s3 server to mininova or piratebay it doesn’t work. Is there a way to do it somehow?

    thx!

  14. Hi, is there any option to make torrent file from folder in bucket?

  15. Hi, Carlton,

    I just found this post today (11/21/2011), this is a very good idea. Just wondering as up to now (today), does Amazon S3 Web Services still allow individual user to seed their torrent file(s)?

    Thank you very much

    1. Author

      I haven’t used it recently, but have not heard of any features being removed.

  16. Hello Folks,
    Thanks for the page. I need a way to torrent the file(s) upwards.
    We have 4gb backups and I can’t get them to ftp with out fails. (Australia) to our AWS FTP server.
    If I could up load using the torrent engine then it would use the torrent process to ensure a valid copy.
    Thanks in advance

  17. This post seems to be highly recommended in all my Google searches regarding using BitTorrent to transfer files to Amazon S3. Very good post. Thanks for taking the time. I’m not sure though if I’m understanding it well enough. What I want is to transfer files from my laptop to my S3 server for storage. More like for backups rather than sharing. Can this process work for that as well? I like that BitTorrent saves you money transferring files to S3.

    Appreciate your help!

    1. Author

      Heidi, BitTorrent is really for sharing files with others. If you want to upload files to S3, BucketExplorer, S3Fox Firefox addon, etc. would be a better solution. If you are just wanting to do backup and not share the files or using them with a web server, Amazon Glacier is better suited for backup. Hope this helps!

  18. Hi, Thanks for the excellent post.
    Follow-up question: is it possible to generate a magnet-link to get that torrent from S3?
    I have tried generating one using external libraries in node.js – created identical to the magnet links displayed when I click “Copy magnet link” from a Bittorrent client e.g. uTorrent – and it doesn’t download the torrent.
    Regular download using the *.torrent file itself does work though.
    I must use magnet links for my application.

    Appreciate your help!

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