TorrentFreak

• Ernesto
• December 29, 2011
• 54
• bittorrent,
  tors.in,
  url shortener
• Print

BitTorrent is a great way to share large files with friends, family or even complete strangers, but it’s not always as convenient as it should be. Even though BitTorrent is more than a decade old there’s no site where users can simply dump torrents and get a fancy URL in return, so they can share with others. Until now that is, because the newly launched Tors.in just filled that gap.

Millions of people use BitTorrent every day, and those who want to share a file of their own literally have thousands of sites to choose from. However, the problem with most public BitTorrent indexes is that they are littered with ads and sponsored download traps that can be quite cumbersome.

Another downside is that public torrent sites don’t support private uploads. All the torrent files users add are available for the entire world to see. This public visibility has its benefits, but sometimes a simple “drop and share” service is a better solution. It gets really interesting when that’s combined with a URL shortener so the torrent can be shared easily on social networks and in blog comments.

Tors.in does all the above.

Although the concept is hardly rocket science and while the site makes creative use of existing code, the service is unique and quite handy. For the creator of Tors.in the idea emerged when he couldn’t find a simple site to dump and share torrents.

“I was making torrent mirrors of important YouTube videos related to SOPA. I wanted to share these on Reddit but I noticed that there was no place to just dump a torrent and call it a day,” Tors.in creator Woodrow Freeman told TorrentFreak.

While looking for a simple torrent hosting service Freeman eventually found Torrage.org, a storage solution that’s also used by many of the larger torrent sites. However, the problem with Torrage is that the URLs are rather long as they are based on the torrent’s hash.

“To fix this problem I decided to create a simple service that allows users to upload files to Torrage, and add a URL shortener to make the links easier to share,” Freeman explains. A few hours later Tors.in was born, and without promoting it in public Freeman already noticed that people started using it.

The process that goes on in the background is pretty straightforward. When someone uploads a torrent through Tors.in the site sends it to Torrage, giving the uploader a short URL in return. In addition, users can also create custom URLs such as tors.in/snowblind to make the link a bit more descriptive than a random string of letters and numbers.

Dump and share, that’s all there is to it.

Millions of people use BitTorrent every day, and those who want to share a file of their own literally have thousands of sites to choose from. However, the problem with...