Arcen should seed a valid torrent.

[Lancefighter]

my apologies then- i was assuming you were relating the misuse of torrents to the fact that they were largely illegal.

[Kjara]

People do tend to villainize torrents due to that, but because that's the main criticism that torrents get, people tend to overlook that there are other places where torrents actually do perform worse than other forms of distribution.  Not to say that there aren't a huge number of pluses to them as well, and its likely that some of the minuses could be overcome if/when people put the effort into them (I know there's some people looking at some sort of torrent client that at least weakly prefers to upload/download from users that are geographically close to you on the assumption that that traffic will cause less overall congestion to the web).

[deMangler]

my apologies then- i was assuming you were relating the misuse of torrents to the fact that they were largely illegal.

No Problem. I wasn't exacly clear, for which I am sorry.
Mis-understanding is common in my life  

Right, back to terminating AI's
dM

<edit> Actually, make that "back to being terminated by AI's....." <edit>

[Ozymandiaz]

Well, from the isp's perspective, torrents are usually much more expensive than normal web browsing even given the same bandwidth consumption due to the inability use things like Akamai servers to provide popular content from local rather rather than distant (or worse transcontinental) locations(especially if you are located somewhere other than the us).  Add to the fact that people who use torrents usually are much heavier downloaders as well, and there is at least some justification on the isp's part to dislike torrents.

Absolutely.
Akamai servers are very useful where on-demand or low latency is required, like dynamic content or streaming media.
Quite often these users are heavier users than torrent users, but - as you say this is dealt with by using services such as Akamai servers, not to mention the asymetrical service favours dowload.
I think that there is a mis-understanding that ISP's shape torrent bandwith because they don't like it. That is simply not true.
They shape it in that way because that is what it is for - high latency software distribution that is suited to off peak times. It is bad when people mis-use the protocol by using UDP tricks or whatver (That is what I mean by mis-use) - because then low latency traffic suffers because the ISP's cannot shape the traffic properly. ISP's HATE that.
My ISP does not throttle torrent traffic at all during off peak, a little in during the day and totally kills it down to a few k at peak times.
That is as it should be.
The problem is, end-users want their content NOW and they think that if thier torrent is being throttled then it is because the ISP hates them, not because the ISP is doing their job properly and the user is simply having unrealistic expections.
It would help if ISP's educated people instead of treating them like idiots (like Comcast did).
Hurrrrumph!

But regardless, when my ISP say I wil have 2 Mbit access, I intend to use it (since they never mentinoned anything about lower trafic). If they give me anything lower they kinda fail to deilver.

But! with my ISP, all trafic suffers for all users on the same net, since the ISP is not only narrowing the torrent trafic, but all trafic. Reardless of the time I use it.

That I really do hate.

I am only downloading some simple stuff that I have limited myself to 250k, yet stil lthey do it. That is imo bad business .

[x4000]

I'm not about to get involved in the larger debate about torrents here.  As a technology, it is certainly an interesting thing, though I tend to find them slower to deliver files.  I have Bittorrent installed on my machine because some programs that I've downloaded in the past were only distributing their files that way -- I find that annoying, since torrents are never personally my first choice, but I know no-one here was advocating that.

Arcen doesn't pay for bandwidth in any fashion, not for our site, and definitely not for our various mirrors.  The mirrors tend to make money based on their ad revenue, so far as I know.  In terms of the costs of our own site, we pay a flat yearly fee at present.  In the last few months we were using something like 300GB of transfer a month despite the mirrors taking the vast bulk of the load, so I'm having to figure out a way to offload that more.

The patch updates in particular are something that I need to start hosting on a different FTP source -- FileFront has a service that looks excellent for game developers, but I have emailed them twice and have gotten no response.  Anyone else know of a free FTP hosting service that allows for direct http or ftp downloads, and which doesn't charge for usage?  I imagine those are pretty rare, but they do exist (see Filefront).  I publish game updates via the AppLife tool, which uses FTP to do the publishing, and then AI War downloads these updates based on the HTTP protocol.  So I'd need something that is compatible with those two requirements.

Other than that, bandwidth has not been a particular concern from my end of things. For md5 hashes, that's something I'm not familiar with how to create (I'm sure I could google it), and it's not something that seems terribly common with... anything I've ever downloaded aside from torrent stuff.  I might get into that at some point, but it's not like I'm looking for new things to make releases slower.

[RCIX]

I'm not about to get involved in the larger debate about torrents here.  As a technology, it is certainly an interesting thing, though I tend to find them slower to deliver files.  I have Bittorrent installed on my machine because some programs that I've downloaded in the past were only distributing their files that way -- I find that annoying, since torrents are never personally my first choice...

Amen, i hate when files do that
Oh, and asking on http://superuser.com/ might be a good idea for your hosting site you're looking for!