Coral and iPodder

So one of the biggest problems with the new audio blogs, is the bandwidth usage. If you host a daily 1/2 hour - hour long show, your looking at 20-30 megs of download per user. This adds up real quick, and you better have a hosting service with some serious bandwidth allowance. If you signed up for your account a few years ago, it just isn't going to work.

So how do you cut down on the bandwidth usage? Obviously by having other people host your stuff. The idea that first popped up on the lists was to include BitTorrent enclosures. Then the BitTorrent peer to peer network would be hosting and serving from every interested users machine.

This has it's problems. For software developers, the libraries are not available in all languages, and the complexity those libraries add is not insignificant. For users do to the way BitTorrent works, old shows that have no active users will for all practical purposes drop off the net. And for blog hosts who have to create torrents out of their shows then host the mp3, the torrent, and an altered version of there feed.

These problems aren't all that big, but there are enough of them for me to go looking for another solution.

What I found was the Coral network. It's an academic program out of NYU that basically sets up a P2P network of webservers, mirroring content from the web. Change any URL to end in ".nyud.net:8090" and you are running off of the Coral servers bandwidth, not the hosts servers. They actively encourage people to use the coral network for their own purposes suggesting you use it "reduce your traffic load and decrease your bandwidth bills" .

This looks like a great solution to me. The software modifications are small and easy, (Here's my patch to Dave Slusher's get_enclosures.pl) and there no changes required of the users or authors. Fast and easy. I've been running coralized since Friday, and all seems well. Hopefully we can get a little support on this one and we can save some bandwidth.

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