Other struggles. This is an internal communication that didn’t fit on Telegram.
The good news is that I have finally figured it out how to set up a torrent place for us. Please let me know if you encounter problems. In theory, I should put a password to https://torrent.freedomalternative.com/donors – and I will if or when it becomes more crowded (with files, that is).
And this is the issue. As seen in the photo, there isn’t much free space available on the server. This makes sense because when I rented the server, I only had in mind the website and an e-mail server and an IRC server. For those purposes, the set up is fulfilling its duties impeccably – and has been for years now. And, under current circumstances, it will continue to do its job flawlessly for at least another 4 or 5 years without any serious modification until I will have to, eventually, upgrade to something bigger.
However, in order to make the torrent thingy indeed useful (particularly for fast distribution of podcasts and larger files), at least 15GB of available disk space is needed. The advantage over the cloud is that I no longer have to keep the file for weeks on end. It’s enough to keep it for a few hours until 2 or 3 people downloaded it and seed it. Also, with large(r) disk space available on the server, it can also serve as a “seeder of last resort” (say newcomers want an older torrent that is no longer active).
Long story short, the options are as follows:
1. As things stand, the torrent feature will be of limited use. Positive trade-off: $0 cost. Negative trade-off: No way I’m developing a forum either.
2. Grab another VPS to serve for the torrent and in the future for a forum or some other ideas that may come up.
Positive trade-offs:
- No more cloud links
- no more browser inconveniences due to the BS interface of the current cloud provider
- if big enough, it can also serve as a wholesale backup (currently I’m handling backups the old-fashioned/primitive way)
- Possibility of running a semi-private forum (or fully private). Or at least an off-the-books simpler website where I could distribute longer announcements like this one. The reason you are reading this here is because Telegram now limits the length of posts.
Negative trade-offs:
- Additional $95 to $120/year cost.
- Additional work for me [both at set up and later on because creating a torrent takes slightly longer]
I won’t be making any decision until after I come back from Italy, but your feedback would be appreciated – since you will be using it 95% of the time and paying for it.
