some basic questions before creating a tracker

i want to open a new tracker sometime soon and need some
advices, as i'm a complete NooB with this...

first of all, any Tip from you tracker owners would be
greatly apritiated. i'm sure all of you made some mistakes
at the begining, so feel free to share.

few specific questions now:

1) i know there are only a few basic trackers that most sites
uses, i'd like to know wich you think is the best/easyest to
use as a user and as a owner.

2) i'm gonna need a hosting company, wich would you recomand?
i wanna start with the cheapest possible of course...

3) is there any neccesary background i'm gonna need to learn
before i start getting into this?

thanks in advance for your time!

You seem to be very fixated on the technical aspects of running your own tracker site. Well, I take it that you already have a working plan for what happens next. Getting your own tracker software up and running is only the very first step and it's a comparably easy one.

What is much more important is to have a plan for the morning after. Once word gets out about your tracker the users will mostly come by themselves, so the question is what you do to keep them. In all my time on private trackers I've come to experience several trackers that looked well on the first view but couldn't keep their expectations. That resulted in general inactivity (just imagine: 5k users registered and some torrents aren't even snatched once!) which is very hard to recover from.

To make a long story short: without a plan on how to keep users on your site, you don't even have to start thinking about the technical issues of running a tracker. Do you have some people who are willing to work as uploaders mid- to long-term who have fast access to stuff? Is the tracker going to be a general one or do you want to specialize in a certain direction? If you specialize, why should users stay with you when they may have better and established alternatives available? If you have all of that covered, you're ready for the next step.

Pretty much every popular and successful tracker is based on some of the very few good basic tracker softwares. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter which choice you make, because before you know it, half of the source will have been touched or rewritten by yourself or someone who knows the stuff. I have to admit that I've never run a tracker myself but I did some (minor) features for a friend of mine and that gives me a basic overview of a few different tracker sources.

My suggestion: take one, have a look for some hacks and addons and test it in a small group of a few people. You will notice the limitations and missing features best this way and once you have a clearer picture what you want/need for your tracker, choosing one or modifying another one will be easy. Oh and one thing to finalize this: as a user I don't care which tracker software is used as long as I have some basic statistics and more often than not, seeder and leecher count is enough to satisfy me ;)

Renting a dedicated server with enough power for a popular tracker can be quite task and not only that, it will be expensive as well. You're just in the planning phase though and at first any good virtual server might be enough at first. Optimizations leading to a lower load-avg aside, without any kind of data (how many registered users, how many ppl online, how many seeders/leechers) it's hard to suggest anything concrete.

I'd recommend not doing it. There's too many right now anyways. You'll probably just end up wasting many weeks/months of your time and money to try to get a userbase which will likely end up failing.
Probably not the best first reply but I'm being honest. Unless it's going to be unique in some way or form, it's hard to get users to use your site over already popular ones.

Edit: Second reply

thanks for replying guys!

sp0ngeb0b: it is going to be unique in content and dedicated
to a very specific subject, but it will not be for the
masses in any way, so it will start with a very limited
number i beleive.

Daniel: i think it is a great advice you gave me, altough i was aware
of most of the things you said and i do have a plan.
i am planing a tracker unique in it's content and will for sure
test it with friends and coleges first before it's going to open
officialy. in my opinion, no matter how great your plan is, it
will most probably not work as you planed anyway and you
will have to change it and flow with whatever comes up.

Well i just have to mention this since no one have.
If your tracker are going to contain copyright material choose a country that a little liberal. As you are the owner i guess you dont want the same thing to happen to you as it did with the people that had Elite Torrents. (just wiki it, if you dont know)

Have and original idea for the tracker (like no one needs a new 0-day tracker)
Have Uploaders.
Find some staff; (its going to be impossible for you to do everything, You have no idea how many users have all sorts of problems)
And preferably you should know them, so you just "hire" some power sick 14 year old kiddies thats going to ruin your tracker before its even started.
And the first few months of the tracker you should let people have some sort alternative way of maintaining ratio (if you are going to have ratio)
Since its going to be close to impossible to seed back 1:1 on a new tracker, And if people cant maintain ratio they are not going to use the tracker, before people start leeching. So give some sort of alternative way of getting ratio. Something other trackers have done: Seed bonus, irc idle bonus, 2-4xupload, and my personal favorite Free leech)

And you should have some people that have done stuff like this before, as you are going to need some coding done. I know there are some sources avalible on the net form other trackers like TB and such, But a lot needs to be done with them before you can start using them as your own.

And best of luck to you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dudave

sp0ngeb0b: it is going to be unique in content and dedicated
to a very specific subject, but it will not be for the
masses in any way, so it will start with a very limited
number i beleive.

---

Well, that's good to hear. There's already 100 sites to download the latest hollywood movie. Your site being geared toward a certain area will be a good thing! :D

Wow, some real helpful info there Cheffy....nice posts :)

-I think the most important thing for you to do is get a good upload team together and get a dedicated site coder (some1 that has experience with TBdev). If the content is there, everything will work out good.

and for the love of good dont use malaysian servers.

* Cough FTN, FSC *

thank you Cheffy, these are really good advices!

i guess one of my dilemas is should i or should i not start
all of this with a coder, someone with previous experience
in this field. i hope i will find some qualified people to help
me with coding as well as with designing.

thanks a lot guys!