Brett O’Connor wrote an informative article on using Amazon’s EC2 service to host a Bittorrent client. For an estimated $75/mo, he can feed his torrent addiction without impacting the bandwidth on his local network.

For me, at home, trying to maintain my ratio has caused big problems for my evening Left 4 Dead sessions, and can sometimes even make day-to-day web browsing a frustration.

So then why not then move Bittorrent out of the home/office and into the cloud? This weekend I was able to do just that with great success. Using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and TorrentFlux (a web-based Bittorrent manager which runs on top of Bit Tornado). I created a web-based, open-source Bittorrent “machine” that liberated my network and leveraged Amazon’s instead. I can access it from anywhere, uploading Torrent files from wherever, and manage them from my iPhone.

Apart from the bits about setting up TorrentFlux, this is actually a great introductory guide to configuring and using the Amazon EC2 service. Those of you who have used EC2 would probably agree with me that it’s a more concise and straightforward introduction than Amazon’s own documentation.

Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent