Setting up my own tracker

[Andy L]

I'm looking into setting up my own tracker. My ISP does a shared hosting package for £50 a year which includes 50 MB web space and 1 GB/month bandwidth. Is that a lot? How many torrents could I host on that? I can envisage this tracker becoming quite popular, but I've read that BT trackers generally don't use a great deal of space or bandwidth.

Also, what tracker software would you guys recommend? I'm fairly competent technically, but I have no experience of PHP, MySQL or Unix. Would I need to learn those in any great depth just to run a tracker?

Regarding the tracker software, I'd be looking for something that's easy to install and run, and it must be configurable so that only registered users can download and upload torrents. Ideally, only registered users would be able to view what's on the tracker and it would have share ratios too.

Thanks for any help offered!

[uhclem]

Have a look at www.filesoup.com

[Cruzweb]

check out http://www.torrenttrader.com for the tracker
and http://www.eniki.net for the hosting. If you don't get tons of traffic you can survive on about 10GBP/year for 100mb space and 1gb bandwith

[paddington]

great thread!

[RainDawg]

First of all, I'd check with your ISP to make sure they hosting they give you is allowed to have a tracker on it. As we all know, the now-defunct EDJ opted to ignore a similar stipulation with their hosting service, and got spanked for it. Make sure your host is BT-friendly ahead of time.

As for trackers, there are lots of free packages out there. Lynne has researched this more than I have, and I'll PM her and ask her to pop into this thread and comment further. But even with these packages, I would recommend you get familiar with mySQL and PHP. Depending on the your host, you may or may not need to learn any Unix commands...but I doubt this will be a problem.

mySQL and PHP are really quite easy, the former even more so since you're not planning on actually setting up the server, but rather just maintaining the site. Your host will have the mySQL server configured for you, so you'll just need to learn how to build SQL queries and maintain the database. PHP is a bit more invovled, but is really quite a simple language. I was able to pickup a good deal of it over 2 weeks I spent playing around with my new personal website recently, and I have a very weak programming background. Check out www.php.net for information.

Hope this helps...

[Andy L]

OK, thanks for the help everyone. Eniki seem to be a lot cheaper than my ISP for space, bandwidth and domain name registration and they're OK with BT trackers too. This (http://www.btiteam.org/) tracker software looks quite good, but I won't know until I've paid for the hosting. I'll see how it goes.

[pyro]

Don't know the deal with this http://www.owntracker.com/