Is it possible to have such higher server cost?

[Cut-Copy-Paste]

Well todays i logged into Bwtorrent after few months and found my account disable (expect:shifty:) . Apparently My acc was talking to much of their resource on their server and they need me to donate 10$ to reactivate it.

This Make me wonder :
They have each month projected cost of 1200$ as Electricity and Brandwith bill And are hosted in Denmark.
With member ship around 80000 (By peer activity i would say less then half are active) is it possible to have such high cost?


PS: This does not include server cost. Apprently they have thier own server and ask for extra donation whenever they upgrade/change it..

[gamesover]

Could be going to their video game/electronic/clothes fund. Is there any way to verify that they really need that much per month to cover their costs?

[TONiC]

No, certainly not.

In my 6 years BT experience I only know one site which I can say is being 100% honest with their funds: ExtremeBits. They have 10000 to 15000 users, just as any small tracker, but only need to collect $500 every 6 months.

[stoi]

of course it is possible, ours is nearly $1000 a month. (and we probably need better and that is co-location IE I own the servers, and only pay for BW/Electricity and space in the rack) PS: i dont send mass pms out or tell anyone the exact amount per month, but yes its very possible. (whether it is or not is a different matter though)

[anon]

It sounds like a bit too much, but I'm not familiar with how much it costs to run a tracker, so I can't say anything useful.

By the way, disabling your account because it was "taking too much resources" is an, allow me to say it, bullshit excuse. An inactive account only uses as much as a tiny bit of database space.

[bijoy]

server cost depends on number of servers & quality of servers. So it is quite possible

[Vorx]

No WAY. Maybe for a tracker like GFT or SCC, which have 100Gbit seedboxes to upload new content...

[mrnobody]

isn't bwtorrents like HUGE, in terms of content and userbase? BCG has $ 1000 bill then i don't see why bwt can't have $ 1200 bill.

[Monaco]

A lot of sites, especially those who run seedboxes, cost several times more than that to run. Some people probably make money running torrent sites, but I doubt that is the general rule. In the case of BWTorrent (never heard of it, which is surprising given its size) I don't see much profit to be made if they are collecting $1,200 a month, less actual costs. I guess it might be some pocket money or more for someone in a third world country, but it just doesn't seem worth the undertaking if run for profit.

[Cut-Copy-Paste]

of course it is possible, ours is nearly $1000 a month. (and we probably need better and that is co-location IE I own the servers, and only pay for BW/Electricity and space in the rack)
No offence but
If i was to host a site i could easly rent a powerful server for like maximum of 500$ a month and dat would easly give me around 2TB of brandwith. :unsure:



By the way, disabling your account because it was "taking too much resources" is an, allow me to say it, bullshit excuse.
Exactly. I think i can look for another invite easily. Oh and did i mention they did not forgot to put info about some latest movies uploaded to lure some1


server cost depends on number of servers & quality of servers. So it is quite possible
Its only bw/electricity cost


isn't bwtorrents like HUGE, in terms of content and userbase?
Userbase? Yes may be it is at around 80000 member. But as i said by peer activity its looks around mid side 0day. and did i point out torrent retention is 0. go beyond 3rd page and everything is dead. Content is abundant but then most of it is released buy individual group.

[colbert]

Quality hosting and servers cost money - I think people are used to cheap seedboxes, but quality site hosting, axx, and multiple servers cost a lot of money.

[stoi]

its not just bandwidth though.

150,000 peers = 150,000 queries every 30 minutes. (actually its more than that if you take into another query for hit and runs, and SP system, announce logs etc etc)

a couple of years back i believe it was something like 10,000,000 queries a day or something (cant really remember now but i know it was a hell of a lot)

a couple of years ago one of our staff members (now ex staff) took the tracker and put it on a vectoral server, it lasted 20 minutes with not many peers before it crashed their servers.

You also have to find a host you can trust (in a country you can trust) and OVH kimulsifi wont do lol

Yes we are probably paying a bit over the odds, but i would prefer that than looking over my shoulder all the time (like i did when we were in Germany, and on dedicated which was more than we pay now funnily enough), or crashes every day.

and btw we pay closer to your valuation than that sites valuation, but it is a bit more than what your evaluation was.

and it wont be just for bw/electricity, there will be server storage as well, you have to pay for a place on their rack (that wont be 1000`s but it has to be taken into account as well), but if you have a cluster of servers, the cost does mount up.

[TONiC]

Dude... I shouldn't need to tell you but Spain is a filesharing haven... and considering the fact there's OVH.es you can get cheap hosting + protection. This protection is demonstrated by the vast number of court cases which have been ruled in favour of the filesharers - torrentfreak it, and the price is made even better as Spain has relatively low tax...

With this in mind, why pay for expensive hosting in Canada, when P2P is a legitimate activity in Spain? Yes I'm aware of the new laws the US is trying to push through... but filesharers there have already fought them off once.


http://www.ovh.es/productos/hg_2010_xxl.xml
Website, seedbox, and topsite all in one ^^^^^^^.

[stoi]

but you are saying thats cheap, we have 4 servers and it comes to a little more than that for 1 server. so.....

[TONiC]

but you are saying thats cheap, we have 4 servers and it comes to a little more than that for 1 server. so.....

The server I linked is very cheap; 48terabytes if HDD... surely that's taking up a fair bit of rackspace + 10gbit port @ 40Tbyte data/month [Again, I'm aware of the connection between cheap hosting and poor routing].... I'm merely putting into context for the average user [who may never visit hosting websites] as to what is available. Now, I know for certain you - as owner of BCG - do not need 48TBytes if you are just hosting a tracker... so choose another, cheaper package with less HDD space, less BW and better CPU specs because that's what you've stated is needed more than most.

[stoi]

Well something to keep an eye on if we ever do move/get kicked out from where we are, but at this moment in time i am happy where we are, yes we do have the odd hiccough but dont most sites (no site it up 100% of the time, well maybe google)

[shipwreck]

With this in mind, why pay for expensive hosting in Canada, when P2P is a legitimate activity in Spain?

Because Spain is still in the EU, and there has been heavy lobbying on the EU level for years to enforce (much) stricter copyright infringement laws. Once those lobbying groups are successful, and there has been some 'success' over the years already, those sane Spanish judges won't help, since Spain as a EU member will be forced to adopt the new guidelines / rules.

A good example for this is the telecommunication data retention rule of 2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention#European_Union

All EU members were forced to adopt it, even if it's against their own constitution. There have been numerous attempts to stop this on the national level because of that, and they may even be successful eventually, but that will take years, if not decades.

The real problem is the EU and the over-representation of media lobbying groups / special interest organisations in contrast to the interests of average consumers.

So Spain may be 'safe' for now, but may not be for too long.

[Cut-Copy-Paste]

Ok stoi thx ur explanation seems fair enough.

As a Admin of respected tracker my last ques for u (if u feel like answering)

Q. Why r site admins so unwilling to disclose their server spec and exact cost and their host they are using ?

[TONiC]

Ok stoi thx ur explanation seems fair enough.

As a Admin of respected tracker my last ques for u (if u feel like answering)

Q. Why r site admins so unwilling to disclose their server spec and exact cost and their host they are using ?

Because they're all making profit. Whether or not this profit is pocketed by the owner, kept for harder times, or reinvested into the tracker is a different matter.

[stoi]

remember when that Mac tracker was going to do it, declare everything (and pay taxes etc) the owner got hounded out.

Its the nature of the beast i am afraid, in the eyes of the law what we do isnt koscha, so we cant really run it as a business, which means declaring anything/everything, I cant even put it on a CV or make a portfolio of it to enhance my job prospects, even just to say "I run a website with 40,000 members so i have leadership qualities" go for the interview, "what website, lets have a look" "Hmmmm sorry no" "OK BYE!".

and our hosts when we went to them, seen a forum post on my tracker and said great, pleased you didnt mention us, keep it quiet, but then bitme.tv use the same host and they have a little logo for them so meh lol

[TONiC]

remember when that Mac tracker was going to do it, declare everything (and pay taxes etc) the owner got hounded out.
VortexNetwork was going to become P2L if I recall, ofcourse it got hounded out.

Stoi, the answer is very simple: Close donations, let whatever funds you have get low, re-open donations. As you said, you can't put "I run a BT tracker" on a CV, but there's a far more ethical reason for this - BT is a hobby, not a business. Shame many BT admins forget that. Shame many regular users forget that too.

[stoi]

if i closed donations we wouldnt last a month, so its not really that simple.

Ok this isnt a sob story or a plea or anything shite like that, we have 40,000 members, between 200-250 donate every month, but that is any amount, so just to get the star, so whats that about 0.6% of the memberbase donate, and members of other trackers wonder why tracker admins send out mass PMs every other week asking for donations (which i have never done btw in 7 years of running the tracker).

its definately not as lucrative as some on here make it out to be, thats for sure.

[TONiC]

its definately not a lucrative as some on here make it out to be, thats for sure.

Fortunatly transparency would end this argument, either in my favour or yours. Unfortunately transparency isn't something thats high on every admin's agenda.

[stoi]

well if you dont trust any admins either

dont donate, after all no one is forcing you to
dont login for a few months, or delete your account/s
get out of BT altogether
make your own tracker and be as transparent as you want to be.

tbh you just have to see this thread on why admins dont say shite all, if they do its,

you are paying too much
go here instead
lieing bastards
making a profit
scum of the earth

etc etc

[TONiC]

tbh you just have to see this thread on why admins dont say shite all, if they do its,

you are paying too much
go here instead
lieing bastards
making a profit
scum of the earth

Do yourself a favour then... become transparent and earn your users' trust. Perhaps they may be more willing to donate to a tracker they know is 100% legit because they can trust the owner, but that sounds like a pretty dumb idea doesn't it?. Expense for you [and for any admin] to become transparent: $0. Trust, community, and guarantee [there abouts] of survival: priceless.

[Quarterquack]

Holy Crap. Do people not understand this yet? At the end of the day, you cannot be transparent. Besides being a security issue, maybe even though you're fine with it, other people you're dragging into legal affairs may not be (whether it be the host, a dc guy, a few admins on board that don't want anything leading back to them etc.).

I have respect for every. single. admin. that refuses to be transparent. Simply because of one reason: I know they're integrity oriented people. It's easy to fake a few numbers, and call it "transparency" - making people believe you're actually spending money when you're not. It's not hard to provide numbers just to satisfy people and keep them shut. It takes a real man to not take that approach, though, and instead adopt a headstrong stance of not caving in, or lying to your users.

If you actually think that "being transparent" can make you trust the admins more, then I say you're not as bright as you think you are. When a site (say SCC, BCG or otherwise) refuses to be transparent, I not only humbly respect the staffers for not treating the memberbase like children that need proof, but I also understand that I'm in good hands that don't make security-side errors.

EDIT: Maybe I have a different perspective on this because I actually ran a few sites that dabbled with legal/moral gray areas (not BT sites), but trust me, especially in illegalities, you don't want to publicize yourself or drag anymore attention to yourself than possible through google.


BT is a hobby, not a business. Shame many BT admins forget that. Shame many regular users forget that too.

Advocating altruism in a protocol that thrives on selfishness? :lol:

So you want admins to not make money, not be able to report their experience in the BT world as real world experience, and yet continue providing stellar service for their members? What could they possibly get out of it (besides the adrenaline rush of living on the edge)?
BT has made many a man a better person. From a coder getting a ton of experience, from a designer learning a few new tricks, from someone broadening their FTP/protocol/router/hacking savvy, and multiple other chances for self improvement. If you truly believe that Stoi should feel no remorse for investing so much time, learning a whole lot, and basically being successful in this melting pot of a competition, but getting nothing in return but empty gratitude in a truly thankless/recordless job then you need to reevaluate your positions on what constitutes a hobby, and what constitutes a skill.

[TONiC]

Holy Crap. Do people not understand this yet? At the end of the day, you cannot be transparent.

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

So you block out some words, some sentences, some codes. Sure, it does not guarantee 100% transparency between userbase and owner, but its a damn sight better than "We need $500 this month. Every month. Believe me, shit electricity just went out." Just putting in the effort to try to prove your transparancy is a sign of your honesty. If you justify your reasons for any censoring of proofs, then it's just as good as a non censored proof in terms of forming a relationship with the community. Hell this sort of thing is even going on in the UK govt: we gave the polticians the ability to spend money that's not theirs, they buy second homes. What if transparancy had been more involved here?

If tracker admins became transparent, or atleast, maintained ethical practises such as closing donations once it reaches 100%, then you [as a BT admin] can help diminish such problems as invite selling.


So you want admins to not make money, not be able to report their experience in the BT world as real world experience, and yet continue providing stellar service for their members?
Yes, simply because monetary value is not fundamental as to whether you can feel proud and boast about you achievements, be them physical or digital.


Advocating altruism in a protocol that thrives on selfishness?
BT has always been about sharing. Along the way it got corrupt by people identifying a way of creating money.


What could they possibly get out of it (besides the adrenaline rush of living on the edge)?
Joy and happiness. Read up on Mayo, Maslow and McGregor motivational theory. Look at the charities and social businesses in this world and you'll see money may not turn the world.

[Duckater]

Like stoi has said if you dont trust the admins dont use the site (what ever site)
But remember one thing nearly every site has to start some where and that is usually by people dipping into there own pockets to start it upand a lot of sites are still after yrs of being open not covering there costs and staff/owners are having to dip into their own pockets to keep them open.
Yes some of the larger sites could well be clearing their costs and more but this I have no real facts on.
Some smaller sites are lucky and have a few good users that donate on regular basis to support a site, but remember wether staff or a vip or just a generla regular user on a site a lot of people do this as a hobby so to some donating a small amount to their fav site see it as no differnet than paying golf subs etc.

Unfortunatly there are still a lot of people in the torrenting world that want every thing asap and do not realise this cannot be achieved for nothing for the sites.

[Quarterquack]

And then it becomes an issue of whether it is "true" transparency, or a fake one. And then that turns into an issue of "What happened before we became transparent and the changes came along?"

For skeptics there will always be a reason to doubt the integrity of those in charge. There's no foul or harm in that, considering what we all have our hands into. However, there's also a few solemn agreements between a site and its member-base, usually along the lines of "Staffers will take care of administrative responsibilities, members take care of everything else - each one sticks their own neck out for the other position in their own regard."

I don't understand how you could ask more of someone running a piracy site (semantics aside) when they ask you for no more than an IP entry in their database. Would it be okay for a site admin to ask for transparency from users, asking them where all they seed their torrents, how long they've had their seedbox, and a bunch of other irrelevant but revealing questions that affect no one directly? Are you sure you want it to be easier for the authorities to locate a server, or are you sure you want hundreds of people being worried every minute of their lives from a raid, just because a few people want to "trust" an arguably dishonest bunch of people? If your trust is easily placed in someone because they make an effort to seem sincere, then you should apply the same amount of trust towards them for the same effort put in towards being the same with their approach towards transparency debates.

I get how easy it is to say "Well, I don't know where my money is going, so why should I even donate?" The same argument applies to all fields of life, from taxes to possibly funding a friend's drug addiction. At the end of the day, there's the mutual agreement of getting what you want. If the site you're on is up and working, who cares about what happens behind the scenes if it doesn't affect you? Sometimes people in authority have to make decisions no one agrees with, simply because they see a bigger picture than others. Sometimes it's the wrong decision in 99.99% of peoples' eyes. But trust me, those 0.01% are right. You don't have to agree with authority to follow it. And you don't have to follow authority if you don't agree with it. Simple, me thinks.


If tracker admins became transparent, or atleast, maintained ethical practises such as closing donations once it reaches 100%, then you [as a BT admin] can help diminish such problems as invite selling.

Can you explain this further? I don't see the relation at all.


BT has always been about sharing. Along the way it got corrupt by people identifying a way of creating money.

BT has never been about sharing. It has always been about getting what you want. That new album, that new game, that new app, that new pack. If "sharing" were what draws people to BT, then we wouldn't have seedboxes, due to people understanding bandwidth is also a commodity, we wouldn't have separate private sites, considering everyone would just share all their material freely, and we wouldn't have staff, considering everyone should share a leadership responsibility. The very ethos that go against sharing are the things that have made BT as a protocol so successful, from staffers striving to make it to the top because of profits, from different trackers leading the competition in a healthy way (pretimes as a standard is a good example of this) etc. If "sharing" ruled the BT world, we'd all still be stuck on Demonoid (fantastic as it is, I don't think I even need to list the drawbacks).


Joy and happiness. Read up on Mayo, Maslow and McGregor motivational theory. Look at the charities and social businesses in this world and you'll see money may not turn the world.

Coming from a family of psychologists, I don't even need to read up on them to recall nearly their every prominent quote. And yet, you agree with me whether you believe it or not. You realize that altruism (idealistic sharing included) does not actually exist, and that even an admin who you require to be as selfless as possible needs to still get something out of the experience. As long as there's something more to be had, the person will strive to achieve it, considering they can always better their situation, once their joy and happiness have been sustained. Maybe you should read up on Maslow even more.

;)

[stoi]

how can you stop invite selling by closing donations, unless you sell an invite with a donation and thats the only way to get one(and is that ethical in itself?).

I have said what servers we have on BCG somewhere before, its basically 2 servers in each 1U rack so 4 servers and 2 1U cases.

[TONiC]

how can you stop invite selling by closing donations, unless you sell an invite with a donation and thats the only way to get one(and is that ethical in itself?).

If a tracker receives 100% of donations by say the 12th [day of the month], and donations close then, then no more invites can be bought. However, would this fuel invite sellers to donate earlier, and in larger quantities? Possibly yes (seeing as they know after a certain point they wont be able to buy an invite to later sell), but is this a bad thing? [In my mind yes, but...] Depends: They [invite sellers] may now guarantee a tracker reaches it's monthly goal, but fueled by someone selling access to your website. Soz, was just a blurb in my tiring mind, ignore it or take note of it...


That new album, that new game, that new app, that new pack
Would simply never have originated if someone wasn't motivated to go outside, buy the album, rip it, and selflessly give it away, possibly risking their career. It's off of these hard working people's backs that other seek to profit.

[stoi]

hmm

1: I have never once offered an invite for donation and never ever will.

2: We dont have invites or referrals since we took the fake page away.

3: When we did have them not many used them, and the majority (not all) that did didnt care about them, they still brought crap in.

4: In the lat few months, we have got in

2011-03 542
2011-02 1097
2011-01 1758
2010-12 1913
2010-11 2929
2010-10 1450
2010-09 1620
2010-08 5719
2010-07 351
2010-06 621
2010-05 775
2010-04 340

the 2010-08 was when we took the fake page off, the months before that are referrals (and we gave out 100,000+ in those months)

i still dont know what you are trying to say though. sell invites, dont care if members than sell them for a profit, just as long you close donations early when you reach cost, dont sell invites, be ethical in what you do, but you are shitstorms and dont trust you if you dont stop donations when you reach the cost.

really fucking strange way of looking at things lol.

[TONiC]

1: I have never once offered an invite for donation and never ever will.

This bro this! This is what I'm on about! Decent ethics... don't tell me, tell your 40,000 strong community!

[Pwner101]

Since stoi seems to be the only one commenting here I decided to chime in...



Q. Why r site admins so unwilling to disclose their server spec and exact cost and their host they are using ?

Core2duo with 2 gigs ram = $130 monthly.
(There are other monthly costs as well besides this.)
Put it this way... my site is much smaller than stoi's but we have other things we use donations to cover that his site probably would have no use for... every site is different and has different needs.. We spend roughly $300 a month.
Of this $300 a month if 60% comes from donations were lucky.
You can come up with your own assumptions of where the rest comes from....
(Our donation bar at 100% really is the amount we spend monthly. No extra funds are set aside for rainy day, buying sports cars, or hiring strippers..)
Note: The bar is cached and upon donating the bar shows the adjustment in about an hour of any donations.

Here's my thoughts on the subject of donations... if someone doesn't want to donate to a site simply don't.
I personally consider my site a hobby.
For as long as I have been running sites... I have never made a penny off any.

I use the same host as stoi and bitmetv.
(I won't say who for the same reason as stoi.)
Finding out who hosts are... is pretty easy doing a simple whois and getting the ip address of the server.

As for why we pay more to use this host... than we could elsewhere.
Location, Who it is hosting it, the uptime is great as well.
Up until a power outage maybe 8 months ago... we had uptime somewhere in the 900+ days range.
Feel free to show me the stats of the uptimes from those spanish ovh boxes if they come anywhere close to even 30 days without any downtime.

@tonic...
Upon our bar reaching 100% the donate button auto goes away.
AKA you would have to manually enter the url for the donation page to donate.

There are sites that run honestly and openly... but are not willing to give exact details for obvious reasons like stoi said...
For obvious reasons.

My personal opinion... I would rather remove un-needed site features and not resort to continuously having to pm users for donations on a weekly basis like bitsoup does. (Note: They actually make profit.)

[shipwreck]

It's kinda funny to be honest. Users demand excellent uptimes and fast browsing of the site, high download speeds, fast pre-times / uploads of releases, good retention, high security / 'safety' of the site / location etc. etc., and all this for free, and yet demand total transparency, as if the siteops aren't risking enough already. It's their arse on the line folks, not yours, so donating ten bucks doesn't give you the right to know every single detail about the site, especially if that information can be used against the siteops in court. If you need that kind of transparency, start a tracker yourself.

I've always been against making profit of warez, and believe me I had a lot of opportunities to do so back in the days, but some of the demands here are ridiculous. I applaud all those siteops who agree with me and do this as a hobby, I applaud sites like A-HD that don't even take donations of any kind because they don't want it to be used against them one day (God forbid), but at the end of the day, it's their friggin' right to do with their site as they please. They take a substantial risk, it's their choice. Don't like it? Don't use it.

[merwais]

1200$ is nothing comparing to Torrentleech cost per month.

Torrentleech 6000 Euro/month.

If it was that easy to run a big tracker, every single person would open a tracker.
BWT deserve some donation. BWT is a great indian tracker.


As far as i know, it's very very hard to get donation from Indian dudes :P
BWT is doing his best to keep his tracker online.

[TONiC]

TorrentLeech has around 180,000 members (tracker updates every 30 mins) + runs its own 10gbit/s topsite [if it wants to be playing with the big boys, this isn't OVH hosted, but Im not sure]. I'd consider 6000E/month to be relatively cheap,but they are able to generate advertising revenue they get from adbrite, as well as partnerships with Travian and 888 [or partygaming, cant remember]