<story><title>Let us serve you, but don&apos;t bring us down</title><url>https://blog.archive.org/2023/05/29/let-us-serve-you-but-dont-bring-us-down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maksimur</author><text>Torrents have the habit of disappearing when no users keep them alive. It happened to me enough times to be wary of such solution. If there&amp;#x27;s a way to keep them alive regardless of interest I&amp;#x27;m all for it.</text></item><item><author>x-complexity</author><text>Unpopular opinion: Severely rate limit retrieving the files from the website &amp;#x2F; HTTP endpoint, and loudly point towards downloading the files via torrents.&lt;p&gt;The torrent protocol was meant to relieve this level of server load in mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>5e92cb50239222b</author><text>How is that worse than serving files via HTTP? With HTTP archive.org is the only peer that can serve files to you, with BitTorrent it will be one of the (hopefully) many peers, and will degrade to the same level of redundancy as HTTP if all other peers leave.&lt;p&gt;BitTorrent also supports web seeds and they don&amp;#x27;t even really have to keep a full client running, just embed an HTTP link into the .torrent file.</text></comment>
<story><title>Let us serve you, but don&apos;t bring us down</title><url>https://blog.archive.org/2023/05/29/let-us-serve-you-but-dont-bring-us-down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maksimur</author><text>Torrents have the habit of disappearing when no users keep them alive. It happened to me enough times to be wary of such solution. If there&amp;#x27;s a way to keep them alive regardless of interest I&amp;#x27;m all for it.</text></item><item><author>x-complexity</author><text>Unpopular opinion: Severely rate limit retrieving the files from the website &amp;#x2F; HTTP endpoint, and loudly point towards downloading the files via torrents.&lt;p&gt;The torrent protocol was meant to relieve this level of server load in mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chronogram</author><text>Have you tried an Archive.org torrent yet? It&amp;#x27;s backed by the servers, but has the advantages of selecting which parts of the archive you want and being verifiable and being able to have more bandwidth on popular archives. The Archive.org servers show up on the &amp;quot;HTTP sources&amp;quot; tab next to the &amp;quot;Peers&amp;quot; tab for me.</text></comment>