Hurricane Electric is one of the first Web Hosting companies to offer BitTorrent with their hosting packages. The service, which is currently in the Beta test phase, will offer users a number of advantages when serving large files. A major advantage of using the BitTorrent protocol, as compared to HTTP, is more bandwidth efficiency when serving large files to a large number of people. The BitTorrent protocol is more bandwidth efficient than HTTP because it taps the unutilized capacity of other computers, resulting in a reduced load on your server and faster downloads.

"The addition of this service will benefit our customers dramatically," said Mike Leber, Hurricane Electric president. "To put it simply, transferring large files via BitTorrent is faster, uses less bandwidth, and decreases the load on the server, resulting in lower traffic costs and better overall server performance."

BitTorrent, however, is usually not as responsive as HTTP. As a result, BitTorrent should only be considered when serving files that are 10MB or larger and the number of people downloading at the same time is more than one. Serving a file via BitTorrent speeds up the effective transfer rate by spreading the load of downloading a file. Those who are interested in finding out more information about Hurricane Electric's new BitTorrent service can do so by going to http://www.he.net/faq/bittorrent.html or by calling 510.580.4100.