I'll do it in this official Sergio Leone order but add a positive touch in the end.

So, we launched VIPeers for direct download and BitTorrent file sharing at the beginning of November. It's been a funny ride since then, and here is a round-up of the first 6 weeks:

The Good:

• We got some good coverage and what pleased us the most is that reviewers saw the originality and the interest of VIPeers, namely to bring together the goodness of centralized hosting with the BitTorrent protocol. Our multi-lingual delicious feed will tell you more about that: http://www.delicious.com/vipeers
• Recently, we have evolved and added a couple of useful options into the Upload form:

  

  This means you can now have your files seeded for up to 3 months, instead of 2 weeks as it used to be.
  And you can add additional public BitTorrent trackers in order to be sure that the torrent will be reliable even if the VIPeers tracker goes down.

The Bad:

After a few days of rapid growth, we blocked the invitation codes as planned. But the servers were already facing a much bigger audience then they used to. We had no problem of scalability per se. But the surge of traffic did inflate a nasty bug that we had out of proportions. The bug dated back from the Podmailing days and we had learned to live with it. But the launch of VIPeers turned it into a major bummer which prevented us from reopening the invitations as early as we hoped, sorry for those who are still in line!

The bug had two symptoms:

• 10 to 15% of the uploads failed with a server error
• The server would be blocked and stop responding once in a while, and sometimes up to once every hour, with no other option than to restart the process

The bug was located in the code of the BitTorrent client we use on our servers, and it was particularly hard to diagnose and to fix because it did not occur in our development environment, but only on our live servers.

So that was pretty bad but we fixed it, so congrats to Alex for finally nailing down and fixing the bug after weeks of nightmare and countless server restarts. And the upload failure rate is much lower than before.

The Ugly:

How do you know that you web service matters? I guess the answer is: "when people start to try to abuse it"
We are there now as some users are working around our service to abuse the storage and bandwidth we offer, even though we offer it for free. Boohoo.

I won't explain the specifics of this issue, not to spread this ugly attitude, but if you abused us I'm pretty sure you are aware of it. The problem is that when people work around our service then we lose control. We can't accept that because without control we can't so anything to keep our costs down, and we can't act to keep the quality of service up.

So, I'm telling you that VIPeers is going to work because we are in control. If some people don't like that, they can seed their own torrents from home and they can run their own servers to boost their torrents or serve http, I don't mind that. All I'm saying is that VIPeers is for users who want comfort, efficiency and low cost, and we need fine control to make it happen.

So we're doing what every abused hosting service has to do: detect abuse and block it. Until we have the ultra-fine control dashboard that we aim at, unfortunately we have to be harsher with all our users. That's why we have put some limitations to the number of http downloads. They will change hopefully for the best but currently it's only a handful of http downloads per file. We allow ourselves to do that because VIPeers is just a beta preview and we hope you understand.

I must stress also that our main advantage is BitTorrent hosting: so use the .torrent for sharing your VIPeers files, if you don't use the http direct downloads, the torrent is going to work just as well as before.

The Gingle Bell

For one, things are looking bright. We know where we want to go with VIPeers and we'll get there soon.

Also, I must admit now that the hosting service was not the end of the story, just the beginning. We have some more Christmas goodies in the oven. Some of you are already getting a sneak peek at them so hold on it's coming...