![]() I’m the bro who hosts the BtSync share for Bad Voltage. Indeed we could actually lose all our mirrors and the bitfolk vps would probably be fine, but its nice for us not to have to sustain all the hits. Mirrors come and go, and there’s little impact. Listeners do nothing unusual, they just get a normal download link which has magic behind it. ![]() ![]() If a server goes down or is out of sync we get an email an can disable it or contact the hostmaster. In the show notes we link to /download/uupc_s01e01.mp3 where there is a php script that does the redirect automatically. So basically we upload, run the sync script and forget about it. A script which checks all the mirrors periodically and emails us when one goes down or is out of sync.A download php script which load balances across servers.A script we run at episode release which triggers a sync from all servers (or servers can just sync periodically).A bunch of community maintained servers.A main central server which hosts the main archive of files.Setting up a mirror network of people willing to mirror the show isn’t as painful as you think. Have you found downloads slow? Have you even noticed? Bear in mind that I have high standards for how easy such a thing is to use, for all of the file hosts, for listeners, and for me, and making things slick and easy normally requires lots of technical work, so if your proposed solution requires me to do a bunch of set up stuff in order for it to meet my high standards of ease-of-use, be prepared to justify why it’s better than the status quo I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this. Perhaps I’m wrong in that? How would it work? Would we need two BTSync mirrors, one for mp3s and one for oggs? How does this interact with the RSS feed, or would we provide BTSync as a different and additional way of downloading the show? (So if someone says “I find the downloads slow”, we can say “you can use our BTSync mirror instead that’s faster.” Would it even be faster? I have lots of questions.) I don’t get how a BTSync mirror will work, and to my mind torrents aren’t yet all that useful to the show because there won’t be sufficient people simultaneously downloading it to split the bandwidth between many peers. We had a helpful offer from someone by email to the show who already runs a BTSync mirror of the show, and hopefully they will chip into this thread to explain how it works. Use Bittorrent Sync as an alternative way of distributing the show.Maybe somewhere like SoundCloud could help here? Are there dedicated free podcasting file hosts? (We’re happy with where the website is hosted, and we don’t want to move that.) I’m happy to hear suggestions for locations here: my biggest concern is cost, in that I would like there to not be any. Move the mp3/ogg hosting somewhere else.It is a lot of technical effort to make it slick and to integrate with the RSS feed, and I’m pretty loath to do it for that reason. set up a mirror network of people who are happy to mirror the show, and let people download from a mirror of their choice.It might be a little slow to download the show at times, but most people have it download in the background into their podcatcher software, so it doesn’t matter. I think there are the following options for ways we could make the show available: Here I’d like to kick off a discussion of what we might want to do about that, if anything. We’ve had a couple of reports that downloads of the show are a bit slow at times.
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