And it's not such a big deal to run a big site, apparently:TorrentBits.org is situated on a dedicated server in the Netherlands.> For the moment we have monthly running costs of approximately ¤ 213.
Another popular music torrent site (not based in the US, of course) meticulously prohibits commercially-available music *and* only allows lossless encodings (which are about 5 times as large as typical MP3s, or about half the size of uncompressed music). It has 90,000 users, 20,000 of which are active at the moment, half of them seeding. The site is causing a distribution speed of 150 MB/sec. Their running costs so far are about US$5,000, and they have already been donated twice that much completely voluntarily.
And, of course, the software they're using for all of this is open-source and free. Setting up a torrent site is about as difficult as setting up a BBS was 20 years ago, it just causes about 4 orders of magnitude more traffic.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium
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