Often public or open trackers are heavily loaded and operated on a shoestring budget, either as an ancillary project or out of someone’s pocket. This can leave them prone to unexpected downtime, requiring DHT or additional trackers to be added to torrents in order to find peers. Additionally, the sudden announcement by The Pirate Bay to kill their tracker has left people scrambling for trackers as an alternative to DHT.

Previously, the only way to check if such a tracker was down was to ask on a forum, IRC channel or news sites like TorrentFreak, hoping that someone knows the answer. Now, though, there is Trackon, a site that hopes to provide answers to these questions in a clear, concise and simple manner.

Trackon uses the Google AppEngine, just like its sister project Atrack. This means that initial costs are low and reliability of the site should be good – exactly what is needed when it’s reliability of sites being measured.

The site currently monitors 46 public trackers, including favorites such as OpenBittorrent, and DenisStalker. Even better it a offers a recent history of status checks and also shows if trackers support SSL, which is a boon to those looking for secure communications.

Uriel, the genius behind Trackon (and also Atrack) told TorrentFreak that his motivation was finding a way to make the BitTorrent infrastructure more decentralized and reliable, without actually requiring any changes to the protocol or clients.

“My conclusion was that a really easy to deploy tracker would make it possible for anyone to set-up and run their own trackers, either private or public. Combining that with Google’s AppEngine was just logical. Trackon came from there,” he explained.

Trackon is still in development and is having more features added as time goes on. Meanwhile, the number of public trackers out there is surprising, exceeding Uriel’s own expectations, “I thought at first there would only be about a dozen trackers, but it’s over fifty now,” he told us.

If nothing else, Trackon proves that the hydra is alive, and spawning trackers.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For example, the mother of all search engines has a special search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet.

Google’s custom search also allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine, and Google’s App Engine enables users to start a free torrent search engine for free by using Google’s servers.

It is quite clear that there are several ways to find torrents through Google. However, just finding torrents is not enough. In order to download content through BitTorrent successfully, one also needs a working tracker in order to locate those all-important peers. Luckily Google can help here too.

By using Google’s App Engine, everyone can run a tracker without having to invest a single dime in hardware or bandwidth. The only problem is making the tracker compatible with the App Engine, but thanks to the newly released Atrack software it is a piece of cake to set one up.

The Atrack Bittorrent tracker is designed to run on Google App Engine and its main goals are a minimal memory use, speed, low bandwidth usage and efficient CPU use. On top of this the tracker wont store any data at all, making it as secure as possible for its users.

“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,” the Atrack team writes.

So now everyone can set up a standalone BitTorrent tracker at no cost aside from the the time it takes to set things up. The Atrack software is released into the public domain, and a test tracker is up and running on Google’s App Engine.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.