Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

Background

Torrent Typhoon was a small project I started back in April 2003. At the time, there was no good real-time search engine for BitTorrent. There was ISOHunt and other websites that indexed sites but didn’t always offer up-to-the-minute results. So I created the first real-time BT search engine, not YouTorrent thank you very much.

Basically, I searched other websites in real-time and parsed their results. At first, it was a really bad implementation of search and replace. Now it has evolved to just ONE "Rules" file where I define regular expressions for each site, real streamlined. The engine takes care of the rest automatically, I was fairly proud of myself. It reduced the average time to search 5 sites from 15 seconds to 3 seconds, on a shared host. I also switched from static search to AJAX making Torrent Typhoon the real "first" of AJAX BT searching (YouTorrent's implementation was better, though).

In the newest revision I also added fail-safe search and automatic error reporting, which made finding bugs easy. I am happy to say that I have had nary a bug (with the engine) since doing everything properly. The only problems that crop up are when a site updates its HTML so you have to edit your regular expressions which isn't a big deal. If you make good regex, then it shouldn't rely heavily on specific HTML.

It was a good site, I updated it quite a few times design wise and added new functionality. However, once a torrent site gets big (even as small as mine was) it gets attention drawn to it. Even though I never touched torrent files themselves, I still kept getting take down notices or DMCA notices. Finally I just decided enough was enough, I’m in college, I really don’t need to deal with this. Besides, most people use Torrentz or Mininova now anyway. Wasn’t worth working on more.

Selling Information

So now, I am selling it. Actually I am selling two kinds of things.

1) Source code only. This is the basic offer… just the engine source and some example files, nothing big. $3000

2) Full package. This is basically everything minus private and confidential data like user emails, passwords, etc. $6000

There’s a catch. If I sell the full package first, then I won’t sell the source anymore because it’s an exclusive license. The same goes for the source. If I sell source only just once, then I can’t offer the full package (unless you don’t want exclusivity). What I will probably end up doing is still offering it at a reduced price but there’s no license or exclusive rights involved. You just get a clone of TT that you could extend.

As far as how I determined pricing… $3000 is about how much I would have been paid to develop and design it myself. Over 14,000 lines of code, I must have put in over 75 hours total on the site over the years for sure. I think it’s still pretty low. That’s not even at $75/hr.

For the package, $6000 is the average value of the site if it makes approximately $200/month which it did. Remember, you will probably make more since I didn't spend a lot of time marketing.

For more details, check out TorrentTyphoon.com.

Note: TT is written in VB.NET and requires a server running .NET 2.0 / 3.5 to run. It doesn't use Atlas AJAX Framework, just a component DLL and YUI for AJAX. It also requires MS SQL Server 2005 for database information.

To make an offer, contact me at my work email by using my web form:

http://www.intrepidstudios.com/contact.aspx

Thanks,

Kamran