BitTorrent

From VuzeWiki

BitTorrent is the underlying data transfer mechanism employed by Azureus. For information on getting started with BitTorrent, please visit Helpful links.

You have a great product, many customers, and are delivering your product to hordes of happy customers online. Serving large files creates problems of scaling, flash crowds, and reliability. As you grow, they become more central to your business, but your bandwidth costs go up as well. It's a vicious cycle.

But there is a solution. BitTorrent is a simple software product which addresses all of these problems.

The key to cheap file distribution is to tap the unused upload capacity of your customers. It's free. Their contribution grows at the same rate as their demand, creating limitless scalability for a fixed cost.

Problem: more customers require more bandwidth. The server needs to send the data to everybody.

The BitTorrent solution: customers help to distribute content between themselves after originally receiving a piece of data from the server. Ideally the server only sends each piece once to one customer.

Read the Azureus FAQ