Retrospective 3: Shared Hosting

Up to now, I've been talking mostly about setup. Now it's time to delve a little more into the day-to-day operation of the early months of the site's life.

As one might expect, things were pretty slow for several months after our January launch. With the low activity on the site, there wasn't a lot to do aside from tinker with features as suggestions filtered in. The more I customized, the more I realized how woefully unequal TorrentTrader was to the task. Unfortunately, I was committed and to change at that point would mean more work still. Instead, I quickly developed a policy of rewriting entire pages as a whole rather than tweaking what was already there.

One of the suggestions was that I add a favicon to the site. The existing logo didn't fit the small size very well, so I set out to make a new one. The product ended up looking pretty good, so I redid the entire site design based on the icon. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of time at my disposal nowadays...

Aside from the constant refinement of features, there's not a lot involved in running a small tracker, no more than what's involved in tweaking any other pet website. Since someone else may be taking care of your server for you, you may not even need to worry about that. The whole experience feels a little like running a lemonade stand on a deserted street, sitting in the sun while the ice in your mother's lemonade pitcher melts. It's just that exciting.

Despite the last few paragraphs of doom and gloom, we did grow slowly thanks to some of the methods I detailed yesterday. In March, a member asked how to donate to the site. Bemused, I opened a PayPal account. The $5 donation felt like a fortune. Since the site was sharing a hosting account with my personal stuff, we were essentially being hosted for free at the time.

Don't worry, all that changes soon enough. More on that tomorrow.

Retrospective 1: Conception

Since starting TorrentFries, I've had a number of people ask me how to start a successful tracker. The first question I ask is always "What sort of material do you want on the site?" Only one person gave me a response other than "everything". Incidentally, I'm now involved in some small way in the development of that other person's tracker. The two aren't directly related (I'm not a sword for hire), but they're not entirely unrelated either.

Listen, I'll let you in on a secret. There are tons of "everything" trackers out there. Come up with something unique to pull people in.

Personally, I believe in unconventional activism. In this case, deep-fried goods are too expensive, so I thought a BitTorrent tracker might get people talking about the problem. Since nobody else had one going, I set out to create one of my own.

The first step in the process was to find a host and a tracker. In this situation, personal connections are nice. I was lucky enough to know a guy that ran a shared web host, so I was able to get things running for $5/month, plus the cost of registering a domain name ($12/year). However, any shared host worth their salt should figure out that someone is running a tracker pretty quickly, so don't count on slipping that under the radar. Instead, you might consider a VPS, which allows you to rent part of a server, rather than having to pay for the whole thing. You should have plenty of control over your server, and get more leeway in terms of traffic. A basic VPS will cost you around $40/month.

However, be aware that there's no way you can buy security for any price you can afford at this point. The best you can hope for is a web host that will look the other way until they hear from a copyright holder. Most dedicated and VPS hosts I've encountered will do this; in fact, some hosts have told me this directly. What you can do is maintain daily off-site backups and have a backup host lined up in advance in case of the worst. We'll talk about contingency planning a bit later on.

Choosing the software involves a fair bit of research. I was pretty lazy on that point, and have been paying for it ever since. The only two trackers I checked out were TBdev and TorrentTrader Classic. TBdev is used by a lot of big-name private trackers such as Torrent-Damage, TorrentLeech, the late OiNK, LearnBits, BitMe, BlackCats, BrokenStones and so forth. However, the administration functions are almost non-existent, and the amount of customization available in TorrentTrader appealed to me. I didn't want to spend much time digging around in the code to get everything to work properly.

I've got a fair bit of experience with graphic and web design, so I took it as given that I'd build a new theme from the ground up. The product was in retrospect not that impressive, but it was certainly usable and unquestionably better than what I'd started with.

Finally, before going live, I asked a friend to take a look at the site. I expected him to spend perhaps 5 minutes and respond with a "looks good", but he ended up giving me a two-page essay including everything down to copy-editing in the FAQ. It was great help, and I was able to refine a lot of features that way.

Tomorrow: details on how to pull members in.