> and egressing out of AWS at $0.09/GB
There's a lot of seeders on the torrent that are actually AWS ips too, all with similar configurations which makes me believe that it's probably xAI running them
> on a VPN
That's unnecessary, you don't need a VPN?
No you don't, but if you wanted to host it from your gigabit office IP, you probably would want to.
> Torrents can unfortunately die after a period of time if no one continues seeding it or if they don't use a permanent web based seeder, which doesn't appear to be the case.
So to can web links, especially when they are 300 GB and egressing out of AWS at $0.09/GB or worse (in non-US regions). Each full download would cost $27 at that rate. 10,000 downloads would cost $270,000.
Sure you could go for something with a better cost model like R2, but you can't beat using one or two unmetered connections on a VPN to constantly seed on Bittorrent, your pricing would be effectively free and reliability would be higher than if you just exposed a HTTP server on the Internet in such a way.