Magnetico[1] is an easy-to-use, self-hosted DHT crawler. It has a web UI that shows statistics and gives you a search engine (it uses sqlite full-text search).

It needs quite a bit of bandwidth and some storage space, but worked well so far, for me. I've been running it for a couple of years and it indexed around 12.5M torrents (36GB of uncompressed database).

[1]: https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

Do you mind sharing what sample daily/monthly bandwidth during discovery looks like?

You can somewhat control the bandwith by limiting the number of simultaneous peers: in my case the usage seems to be around 5 Mbps up/down.

If you're running it from home, the real problem is not the bandwidth but the number of open connections the router has to keep track (assuming the network is NATed). The default settings will likely crash any cheap consumer router, so I would run the daemon from a VPS or a machine that isn't behind a NAT.

> what are some similar self-hosted solutions that allow you to search torrents on public trackers?

Jackett. https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

also Prowlarr https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr

also Magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

implemented using Elixir and Phoenix. Cool little project

It's a former project by OP, who stopped work on it: > I've paused development of Magnetissimo to focus on Torrentinim.

Good catch, didn't notice that!

I use it to search for DODI releases and x265 releases, it's faster than looking through websites. Once I finish Radarr/Sonnar support, I'll point my instances at Torrentinim.