Torrents are not allowed here

WHB, as do many web hosts, prohibits torrenting on its servers. From time to time some clients have complained about this in the WHB forums, as they do in the forums of other hosts.

Clients wanting to torrent usually argue that torrents are not used solely to share pirated media, but also for legitimate purposes. For example, a forum member wrote: “Torrents are not piracy. Most linux CDs are distributed this way, as well as other legal content.”

Piracy is not the sole issue here. Web hosts must ensure that high-resource uses such as torrent or video downloading do not occur on shared servers. That could consume too many resources and impair performance for other clients.

Many people run torrenting on servers called “seedboxes”, to get much faster upload and download than would be possible from their home computer. Seedbox performance is available by purchasing a monthly account. However, a web hosting account is cheaper, so some people will try to use their web hosting as a seedbox, causing problems for everyone else on the server and costing the host in bandwidth.

What people fail to understand, with their arguments about the legality of their particular torrents, videos, music or other content, is that WHB does not disallow such use only because it is most frequently used for pirated content. WHB bans them because they also tend to hog shared resources. It’s the same reason that pornography, video streaming and resource-intensive scripts are prohibited.

Web hosting accounts have rules, many written to ensure good performance for all clients. When signing up for hosting, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the host’s terms of service, so you’ll know what is and is not permitted.