404 not found is the worst I’ve seen, but in BitTorrent land I’ve seen torrents that never take off as well. In my experience, BitTorrent’s supposed benefits don’t outweigh its negatives… and it’s not often that I see a plain old HTTP/FTP server fail as badly. And if I do, the automatic retries prevents the problem from getting to the point where it it comes to my attention.

Really, it is incredibly rare that I find a server that doesn’t support resuming… and even for those that don’t, most of the time I’ll never know because I don’t get a broken connection. HTTP/FTP tend to allow me to download reliably at the maximum possible connection speed. And I’ve seen many, many torrents download 99%… and then just quit right there.

And not always download at the maximum connection speed at the same time. The only problem is, BitTorrent has a tendency to outright hog all the bandwidth it can, with the capability of bringing any network connection to its knees. While these days all major and a lot of minor web servers support this, using a better protocol (like bittorrent) that has this as a central feature is IMHO a better solution. This assumes that the server supports range requests.

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