Two decades ago, the torrenting world lost a legend: Suprnova.org. This pioneering file-sharing site, on

Suprnova’s Founder Speaks: 20 Years, Many Lessons, and a YouTube Empire

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2024-12-22 11:30:02

Two decades ago, the torrenting world lost a legend: Suprnova.org. This pioneering file-sharing site, once a hub for millions of users, was abruptly shut down on December 19th, 2004. Today, we revisit the Suprnova story and speak with the site's founder about its lasting impact and the YouTube empire he built in recent years.

At the time, Napster has just shut down, leaving a void in the file-sharing landscape. A Slovenian teenager named Andrej Preston has just discovered the new BitTorrent protocol at the time and decided to embrace it.

Andrej, commonly known under the nickname ‘Sloncek’, started Suprnova out of personal interest, as he couldn’t watch some TV-shows in his home country. Like many of these early hobby projects, it started as a very primitive setup, hosted on a Linux box at Peston’s home.

In the weeks that followed, word of the “Universal BitTorrent Source” spread like wildfire, maxing out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity of the residential internet connection. Faced with this explosive growth, Suprnova was moved to an external hosting company, with many mirror sites later helping to distribute the traffic.