Offer a Torrent for Your Website's Downloads, Please!

There are so many websites that offer downloads from a server, without offering a torrent, and it's driving me crazy! Most high traffic sites have download mirrors, which is a really old fashioned way for them to offer decent speeds around the globe. However, for a very long time now the BitTorrent protocol has existed, which is a far superior method of both offering downloads and actually downloading files.

So far the only website that I have found that has realized how useful torrents are, is OpenOffice.org.

As you can see in the screen shot above, taken from the OpenOffice.org downloads page. I am pointing at a link that they offer which takes me to a page where I can get a torrent of the installer file.

In case you need some convincing, here are some reasons why you should offer a torrent on your website, if your website is providing files for download:

• Torrents allow users to download a file or folder, in little pieces, while optionally sharing completed pieces with peers that are also downloading the file. Those that have the complete file can then drop the torrent or continue to share the file. Therefore, setting multiple computers to host the file is simple, and you have a lot of redundancy, because users are downloading from the best sources from all available sources at a given time, so sources can drop without worry. Even if every one of your file hosting servers went down, users could still download the torrent if the peers have pieces the user does not, and if the user needs to wait for the one of the file hosting servers to go back online, then it's no big deal, incompleted torrents will quickly resume when more of the file becomes availible.
• The download speeds for your users will greatly increase.
• Your bandwidth costs will decrease.
• The entire internet will be more efficent.
• You will be leaving a smaller footprint on the Earth.