NewTorrents: when popularity becomes a problem
I have some problems with NewTorrents.info. It’s nothing so serious, but it forced me to think for few nights (yeah, I think about stuff mostly before I get sleep 
). The problem is ironically the popularity of NewTorrents.info. This project was started cca 2 years ago as a very small website (you could find some screenshots of this old version somewhere at NT forums) with absolutely no intension to make some huge website or torrent portal. I think that I can see that after these two years, NewTorrents took up a decent position in BitTorrent world. Yeah, we are still not that big as many others, Mininova, Torrentspy and these websites offering all sorts of torrents, but that’s also one of the reasons why is this web popular. Sticking to pure scene releases limits our amount of torrents on the one way (and with this come some limit of visitors), but it also makes many people happy because they may rely on the quality and public trackers. And I’m not going to change anything about this.
In these days, the main website is visited by 50-70 000 unique visitors every day from the whole world. This is not as much as get some bigger torrent websites, but it’s still a decent amount of people every single day. Many webmasters would be really happy for these stats. And this now became a small problem. I had begun the website on free webhosting, but it was just in the roots, where it was visited by almost noone. Then I quickly moved the website to some third party servers or shared hostings kindly provided by satisfied fans or visitors of original NewTorrents. This provided few weeks of work, but the amount of visitors had become to increase quite rapidly and these not dedicated servers weren’t enough powerfull to handle the load and traffic. The next step was shared hosting on very powerfull server, which was able to provide enough resources for it in the time of the biggest boom. But the again, somewhere at the level of 20-25 000 visitors of day, webhosting company decided to dump it and offered us an own server. The price was just too high to pay for it so we had to choose some less powerfull option which did a great service for some months again.
I will not cover next boring details but just describe the current situation. NewTorrents.info are running on dedicated server at the moment with some 2 GB of memory and good CPU. The current problem isn’t the load of this server, it’s managing it fine, but there’s another issue: traffic. May be it’s hard to believe for somebody, but this single website “eats” a constant bitrate of 10-20 Mbits. The traffic for one month is ballancing somewhere between 2 and 3 terabytes of data. Ask some owner of web server, or just check some offers, and you will quickly realize the common offered traffic is somewhere about 500 GB or 1 TB a month. Noone will also provide you with 20 Mbits of unshared bandwith, you will be almost always placed on some shared line with hundreds of other clients. Our current webhoster just realized, it’s not much profitable for him, so he asked for incredibly higher price. The problem is also the foreign traffic, which is always more expensive than the transit inside one country – our traffic to abroad makes something like 98% of overall one. And that costs money. A lot of money.
I wouldn’t be probably writing this in case of some normal price or anything, but we are forced to pay little more than usual price for your leeching pleasure. One would think that such a website with mostly text and not so many graphic parts can’t make such a load, but the reality is slightly different. Our website is also heavily spidered by bots crawling torrent portals to gain new torrents and save them on their server. So the price we must pay every month is not a few dollars, its also not $100 or $300, but it’s something like $500+ which is quite a lot for such a hobby. That’s also the only reason why I must keep all the ads on the site. You probably think I must be earning millions, but that’s terrible wrong. The reason is simple, torrent sites aren’t accepted by the majority of ad serving companies, so we must take what is offered. And that’s often the biggest shit you can find on the net – companies paying you $0.01 or even less for 1 click. There’s also this nasty problem with spyware and adware, which is really killing my mind. I’m always trying to remove this ad with some malware/spyware/adware as soon as possible, but it’s just an infinite fight – you contact your ad company, it’s ok for few days, but then there’s another bastard misusing you, my visitors.
So the conclusion is that these money from ads are so-so enough to cover a still increasing hosting bills. I would be so happy to have fast & clean website just with one or two ads, but it’s quite impossible at the moment – I’d have to pay quite a lot of money from my normal salary (which isn’t too high anyway) every month to keep the server alive. We will be moving the website to a new dedicated server during this night or tomorrow, hopefully without bigger problems. It’s still my hobby so I’ll do my best to keep it the best, but please be kind of pleasant when you see some annoying ad or the server will load a bit slowly. We’re all just humans…
Comments(50)
One word man – RESPECT.
Man, only people that have no clue what hosting a site like NT requires would complain, or have complained.
Put as many aDS as you need to cover the hosting costs. I’m almost at the point that I can start donating, once those student loans are paid
So much respect to everyone involved with NT, hosters, coders, uploaders, mods, all of you deserve mucho respect.
Im glad your hobby keeps my hd full, and soon I won’t be a leech, and I ask anyone about to spend 15$ for a WoW card for the month, instead, feed the hand that’s been freely feeding you!!!
Keep up the good work
And good luck.
Frankly, this is one of the few web sites which don’t have many a pop-ups or too many Ads,
I still would recommend to have some Ads & add some graphics (movie/game posters) to the site
Have you tried to become a.. say.. partypoker affiliate? Thats pretty good pay if they just accept a torrent site.
My thoughts goes to you guys at NT.
The problem is also the foreign traffic, which is always more expensive than the transit inside one country – our traffic to abroad makes something like 98% of overall one. And that costs money. A lot of money.
^^^^ That’s bollocks. There’s no discerning domestic or foreign net traffic in costs. Whoever is hosting, doesn’t have one iota more expense whether the user comes from abroad or the same country.
The problem with your ADs is a logic one, however it can be easily solved. Porn ads!! Those porn webmasters will put their ads anywhere on the web where there are teenagers! Of course it will limit your visitors but that’s a good thing in your case…
As Predin posted – RESPECT
NT is the only torrent site I use and if ads pop up well they get annoying but if it means your able to keep the site running without having to dig into your pocket then so be it Martin.
Keep up the good Work! !
mate trust me it makes a huge difference in my case. i know there’s no difference in many countries but it also makes a big difference in some and i am unfortunately in the second group…
Martin, all I can say is, much respect to you and those behind you at NT. I couldn’t even begin to think what it must be like to manage this beast… a hobby? My job is 10x simpler than your hobby. Don’t stress too much before you go to bed – everything comes and goes. You’re a clever lad, you’ll be alright.
And why not set up some sort of a donation box just for fun… see how many of us actually chip in… you might be surprised.
open your eyes ,martin you should make this a Ratio based site and sell ous ratio bonus
hehe nightwalker don’t worry i will not make newtorrents private and i will not be selling anything, that’s not my style. we did some surveys about possibility to go private, but over 90% of visitors replied NO, stay public, so we will stay public forever…
@ SodaBoy – yeah I’ve been thinking about some donations but as far as I can keep the server bill covered by ads, there’s really no need for this. may be in time it will cost somehow much more (which will hopefuly never happen), but there’s no reason for donations now…
you seems to me like symphatic person
i see you are fine guy. keep up good work and good luck with your site.
btw where are u from Martin ?
hey martin (m@ster I prefer)..if you had a donation box i would definetely consider EVERY month ..N.T.is the first site i log onto when i come home from work…it is a good community and you should be damn proud of what you have produced….well done FRIEND
I just have to second the shoutouts of respect.
To have created pretty much the only good open scene release site and have managed to keep it open without once asking for donations or having agreed to malware from your advertisers is quite an acomplishment and a testament to your character.
I would suggest though that you perhaps put up a donation icon somwhere on the page, dont even mention it if thats more your style, but that way those of us who would like to help out can, and perhaps one day if the hosting costs increase you have a buffer to take from, as well as for other costs involved in running the site.
My 2 cents
“^^^^ That’s bollocks. There’s no discerning domestic or foreign net traffic in costs. Whoever is hosting, doesn’t have one iota more expense whether the user comes from abroad or the same country.”
That may be bullucks when it comes to shared hosting and small bandwidth purchases, but when you’re moving this much data, traffic is rated (usually on a per month basis ie 30% of you bw was from holland last month) and companies will raise the rates depending on the previous months stats. Tier 1 providers only have X number of connections to asia / europe etc. and they have to keep those lines free enough or open new lines which is very costly.
I like the word… RESPECT.
In this time, this word is exactly what I feel.
Is good to know that there is still people loving the scene and DOING things like this.
M@ster, you are great. Thanks for give us quality, that’s why I’m still here, you provide quality… and fast.
Just one tip, would it help if the site uses AJAX, so the load would be lower… and I think that the RSSs are the most bandwidth consuming, since they are called every hour or less by thousands of people, I know I do, sorry.
Time to think out of the box.
Notice throughout that whole thing he never once mentioned donations or anything. Wow, this site is to this day and continues to be the No.1 Scene Release site in my books. I’m goin’ to click the ads like 50 times right now. lol.
well as I see it: newtorrents.info isn’t a tracker. it’s just a torrent lister. all torrents listed uses public trackers ELSEWHERE, which means that the ACTUAL use of those torrents after dling is hogging bandwidth on the trackers. of course newtorrents.info provide a nice service by indexing the torrents, but the actual service is provided by other servers which do not belong to newtorrents.info.
Not really “dude”. The .torrent files, even if they are small and stuff, are hosted @ NewTorrents. Just check it. And think that if it’s 50kB for a .torrent file and it’s downloaded by 1,000 people it’s ~50MB of traffic. Multiply it by number of torrents here…
Anyway, Martin, maybe gzip NewTorrents? It should speed up stuff and it’d save some bw for pages at least… http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewtorrents.info%2F
Anyway, RESPECT
interesting comment Mori, I’ll check this gzip possibility out, it looks quite good…
hey mori quite a gud idea and yes martin if i can ill be donating at least 10$ next month o more if i can and respect to all nt staff.
Martin, You nailed it ! RESPECT!!! i also want to thanx m@ster, and all the mods… and uploaders like me on newtorrents.info did a huge job every day!
i’m not saying newtorrents.info have no traffic, read what i say… martin is just indexing torrents and offering them for download, but he is not providing any tracking services for them. sure, offering a forum and small torrent files costs money too, every site using bandwidth costs money. but the tracker is what provides the real service, but having to pay for just being able to dl a torrent files is pretty lame. anyone can collect torrent files and offer them up. it would be just the same as if nforce required you to pay to view nfo files. in the end, the torrents from newtorrents.info is still depending upon trackers to be able to benefit from them. the trackers provide the REAL service, i’d rather donate THEM money. when newtorrents.info set up a tracker, they can have my dough.
well dude we don’t have our own tracker because of very simple reason: security. noone can blame us then we are offering something wrong (noone should problem blame the owner of tracker too). and no, newtorrents aren’t just collecting torrents, something like 1/5 of all torrents are seeded by our people. we have just some deals with tracker owners to use their service (TPB) as a tracker, that’s all
Martin, how to contact you?
I have similar website and could recommend you to a good ad company.
I’m happy to join everyone here with the “RESPECT”. NT is the best torrents site i have used [and not only for that]. Since i have joined NT, ih have dumped the other sites. There is much more information in NT than any other sites. Also the forums helped me in many occasions. If and When the time will come, i don’t mind if you add more AD’s or Popup’s in order to maintain the site.
Further more i have a suggestion that you might consider.
‘gismo86′ suggested “partypoker affiliate”, i have a similar one.
There is a big and growing community of Backgammon players out there, so why dont you take it to your advantage.
*http://www.play65.com/
It comes with 17 languages, and in my country it even get publicity all over the media. Maybe you can affiliate backgammon.
Anyway, keep up the good job
thanks for tip ddady, but from my experience i noticed a lot of people are already full of these poker/casino/bingo games. i can give it a short try though to see if it works or not.
tech-one: http://www.rlslog.net/about/
GZip’ing is very easy if you are using PHP. Just add as a first thing on the page (***nothing*** must be before that):
See http://ee2.php.net/ob_gzhandler
Note: You cannot use both ob_gzhandler() and zlib.output_compression. Also note that using zlib.output_compression is preferred over ob_gzhandler().
ob_gzhandler works just fine, though. Generally page sizes go down to 1/3 of what they were before – depends of the page contents, of course.
Heh, comment engine apparently ate the bit of PHP from my previous comment… or thought that it is real legit PHP O.O. If latter, that is **bad**.
good shout-out martin… this site has always been the best.
and i honestly recommend that you start a donation box (via paypal or something)…
how could it hurt? and it would at least take some of the pressure off of you – which sounds like it gets to you a bit… if we feel like donating, then i think we should be able to – its our money.
~~~~~~~~but from my experience i noticed a lot of people are already full of these poker/casino/bingo games~~~~~~~~
The biggest different between “poker/casino/bingo” and “Backgammon” is that “poker/casino/bingo” are a 100% luck, and “Backgammon” combines both luck and knowledge\experience.
But like you said, give it a try, if it wont help for sure it wont hurt.
da best torrent site ever fast+clean little pop up but hey we all know pops up. but hey man ur da best and as for the growing numbers of visitors well i do spread the word on direct connect that NEWTORRENTS as all the latest proper releases and above all clean from porn
Try it, Martin, as it is worth saving those kilobytes, and it’s only one line or two to add to header.
Again @Dude,
There always has to be an odd smarty in a jar full of tasty m&m’s…
Dude, perhaps you wouldn’t donate for indexing torrents – but that is precisely what we need. I love NT because Martin takes the time to neatly group everything without having to click 50 times to reach the page you need, he includes very useful comments about new things to be downloaded, and even though his English has been criticised in the past for very little reason, his comments are many times better than the comments I found on other sites… the man manages to say in 5 sentences what i fail to get out of reading a full review from other places.
Anyway plz don’t spoil the line of RESPECTS directed at Martin&Co. Other people deserve respect too, but here we wish to honour NT, which does what it does, and does it extremely well.
And @ Mori & DLX, is there any “side-effect” from this GZipping thinnige? Is it widely used? New? What’s the story? Just curious.
SodaBoy:
As far as I know, there aren’t any side-effects for the gzipped pages (although, see below). All modern browsers support this – heck, even Lynx supports it. And if the browser doesn’t accept gzipped pages – well, Apache checks for “Accept-encoding: gzip” field in the request and if it doesn’t find it, no gzipping. (at least that is the theory how it should be…)
NewTorrents runs on:
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-16
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10-16
“ob_start(”ob_gzhandler”);” has been possible since PHP 4.1, I think, so no problems there. PHP must be compiled with GZip library, NewTorrents doesn’t have /phpinfo, but I’m certain it is included already.
Downside of the gzipped pages is that some ancient personal firewalls cannot handle gzip. Very old versions (around year 2000) of the Outpost FW had that problem, I think. That isn’t an issue with NewTorrents, though.
SodaBoy: Well, RLSLOG, if you check it, is GZIPed. Proof: http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rlslog.net%2F
So, as you can see, no real downsides of that. IMO it should have been added as default in Apache everywhere…
More info can be found at PHP.net: http://pl2.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-gzhandler.php
Anyway, RLSLOG seem to be running on another server than NT. Why, Martin?
OMG, I miss EDIT button here. So sorry for double-posting, but I’ve forgotten two interesting links for ya:
NT: http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5uZXd0b3JyZW50cy5pbmZvLw==
RESULT: http://www.newtorrents.info/ is not gzipped
Page Size: 37 K
Size if Gzipped: 8 K
Potential Savings: 78.38%
RLSLOG: http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5ybHNsb2cubmV0Lw==
RESULT: http://www.rlslog.net/ is gzipped
Original Size: 58 K
Gzipped Size: 14 K
Data Savings: 75.86%
Damn, that sounds like an interesting prospect.
Thanks for the explanation DLX and Mori.
Cheers
cool Mori, these results look very good I will give it a try. As I wrote before we are moving the site again to new server in these days and I’m almost sure I’ll enable gzip on the new server. about the reason why is rlslog running on different machine – we had some problems with admin of NT’s server when I founded rlslog and I wanted to launch rlslog as soon as possible so I simply selected another webhost and payed for shared webhosting. I’ll move it on the new machine very soon too, but this is not important for you as the visitor as far as it works
Something just popped into my head that might be something to look into, but first:
Yes, NT uses other trackers. The fact is, every NT released torrent is validated, and removed if needed, I can’t think of any other sites that do this.
Aswell, NT bares the burden of not only all the traffic downloading those torrents, but other sites basically crawling their site and linking torrents from there, so NT takes all that bw burden aswell
And when talking high traffic sites like nt, the region from which users are coming MAKES A HELL OF A DIFFERENCE IN THE HOSTING COSTS.
If you’d rather donate to the tracker, go for it, no one asked you for ANYTHING. As of yet, you can’t even donate to NT.
So go ahead and class NT in there with all the indexing sites now. Enjoy your spyware ridden torrentreactor downloads.
Ok, end of that rant.
http://mod-torrent.sourceforge.net/
A mod for appache so it hosts your website via a torrent swarm. I don’t know alot about it, but it might be something to look into.
Think about that, a torrent site delivered to your browser via torrents.
@sodaboy
sure, anyone’s the owner of their own money and can donate to whatever they want. but if you don’t have money to throw away, i’d rather say you’d be wise “donating” it to some reliable private tracker instead, that can supply whatever you want on good seeds. again, no offense to newtorrents.info, but there are many other free torrent indexing sites, that in the end will provide you with exactly the same torrents (ex mininova) for nothing too…
martin, you are one hell of a guy.
I can see that you have already performed a couple of the suggestions people have supplied here.
cheers, man, people like you make the web a better place.
I know paypal was mentioned before but what about those of us who don’t have credit cards? how would we donate? I would have to send a money order directly to someone…Which I would…gladly..the problem with that is privacy. I wouldn’t want my address or po box know throughout the world just to get a few donations. So like I said, how would someone help out NT if they have no credit card? I know how much this is costing to keep this wonderful site going, and I would dread it if you went with the porn suggestion. There are too many children who visit this site. I believe that if NT started to openly make money through paypal, or donation boxes listed on the site, it may just get a little more attension from some unwanted governments creating more finacial burdens for you. I don’t know I could be just paranoid….The IRS tends to do that to me. Bottom line is, this is a wonderful site and great people, I would pay to keep it open, and porn free.
I really appreciate what you’re doing here Martin, much respect and admiration. This and Newtorrent are the first websites i visit everyday to know what to download and catch up on some news. I know you think that donations are still not necessary, but its really not just up to you, some of us wants to show our support financially. So think about it, i personally would like to help out. Goodluck and God bless!
Mate thanks for all the good work, but ffs turn it off…its not worth you getting charged $500 a month for this. Save your money dude. Seriously let the big boys take the hits for the torrents, take all the links down and turn it into an info site only.
billgatesy: I agree with your opinion.
Besides, there´s always the risk today in running torrents sites as we all know…
Keep Rlslog. People can download from newsgroups. It´s safer to you and to us as well.
I never downloaded anything from torrents… Anyway this is only my opinion.
Thank you Martin for all your work and time! Good luck!
Martin, just relax man! The site is blazing fast even on my friend’s 128Kbps connection, no issues at all. You’re doing a great job, and as others mentioned it above – RESPECT
Cheers.
just use an ad blocking software people….. everyone is happy that way (incl. Mr. Martin!!)