Choosing a seedbox provider

Choosing a seedbox provider can be hard! So many choices, so many offers, so many caveats!

Do i want unmetered or traffic limits? Do i want 10Gbps down speed or is 100Mbps sufficient? What is transmission? What is rTorrent? What's deluge?

It's then best to go someone like Pulsed Media with their 14day moneyback guarantee and emphasis on ease of use, making it risk free. They even have Bitcoins as payment method :)

But if you are looking for 10Gig speeds, then someone like feralhosting is more to your needs.

10Gbps, 1Gbps or 100Mbps?
If you are looking just for a downbox, downloading stuff via a 3rd party server quicker and then FTP'ng that data to home, then 100Mbps can be sufficient since 9gb file still downloads in under 15mins, and your home connection is likely much more slower than this, if you have fast download speed at home, then you need 1Gbps - at least down if not upload as well.

If you are seeding or publishing your own content - you need to have more bandwidth available to you, a 1Gbps starts to become a necessity for certain users, but 100Mbps is still a fair bit of bandwidth if you are looking to publish something on a public tracker, that's fair bit, it's still 700Gb a day!
If you are competing with others, then you definitively need as much bandwidth as possible. 10Gbps, Autodl-irssi etc. becomes a necessity of life very quickly.

Blazing fast speeds on a shared seedbox server?

YES, that is possible! and not only with SSD servers, but also with more traditional servers.
You need something like Pulsed Media's Super100 seedbox, with few users per disk and traffic limits ensuring you get a fair piece of the pie that is bandwidth.

You will then be able to use much more larger share of the pie at the time you need it, rather than potentially be limited by resource hungry other users on the server, and thus getting blazing fast seedbox speeds.

Look for the overall offer, if it has traffic limits you can potentially have much higher burst performance than otherwise expected.

How Copyright laws and lobbyists stiffle innovation

TorrentFreak reported that Flixtor and Torrentlookup was shutdown by the developers voluntarily due to pressure from MPAA. They were looking down the barrel of a huge lawsuit and were not capable to defend themselves in courts.

I haven't seen nor used Flixtor, but from the screencap and description i gather it was quite a bit of innovation - a competing product for Netflix but using torrents as the distribution mechanism and apparently free for users.

Now this is the kind of innovation we need, but is being stiffled by MPAA, RIAA and the likes. Just imagine,easy to use app for the newest movies and a huge selection, powered by bittorrent on the backend hence costing 0 for the developers to handle the distribution of data, and free for users.

Why, couldn't they just work with them? Make some kind of deal to keep this innovation moving. The irony is that this is the kind of innovation which actually is in the best interest of copyright holders, really the only question should be how do we monetize this platform where our releases freshly available and has a huge market, and has zero distribution costs, worldwide access.  Even if the copyright holders would receive just few cents per viewing of a movie, they would stand to make a killing when something like this becomes popular enough.
Since distribution is powered by Bittorrent, it's accessible from China, India etc. at the same flat rate, and those are some huge markets out there.

100Tb Servers No More!

In the past there used to be 1Gbps 100Tb Servers, which meant these dedicated servers had traffic limit. Usually you could not even come close to that traffic limit on a dedicated server.

Today's trend however are 1Gbps burstable and strict limits on the total bandwidth of 150-300mbps.

Traffic limits and traffic overages are a thing of the past, and the seedbox community thanks thee!

Dedicated Seedbox vs Shared Seedbox

Dedicated or Shared Seedbox? That's quite an question!

It all depends on your budget and what you are after. If you want stable speeds and lots of resources, and got a bit of budget - then definitively a dedicated seedbox is your option!

If you need more burst speeds, and don't mind sharing the connection, or you are budget limited then shared seedbox is your choice.

Technically they differ in that dedicated seedbox has dedicated resources, dedicated hardware *just* for you, so for the money it may not offer as high peak speeds or performance, but you will not share with anyone else neither.

Shared seedbox is a slot, or slice, in a server with multiple users. It does not mean you share an account with another user, it merely means that there is a multitude of users on that same server which may affect your speeds.

If you are worried that no bandwidth will be available for you to use, to hit an server with heavy users then a good middle point choice is a seedbox with traffic limits. The traffic limits ensure that a single user may not use 100% of the server resources, as they will get limited if they do too much traffic.

Why is a Seedbox a good idea for downloading Torrents?

Are you someone who craves for extreme upload bandwidth during your torrent phases? Do you need an equipment which lets you meet all your tracker relationship obligations but leaves your own home personal computer free for other internet activities you may have to do? Are you a content producer who wants to keep his submission bandwidth costs to the minimum? Are you a victim of traffic shaping? Are you a file sharer who works in an anti- P2P company that doesn’t let you do your work? If you have answered yes to one or more of the above questions, you just can’t do without a seedbox!

With a seedbox you don’t even need to trouble your home computer with a Bittorrent or rTorrent client. Worrying about the MPAA and the RIAA spying that may be done on you will be over. No more DMCA news or notice letters will be sent to you and no suit letters will bother you anymore. Not only can you move your rTorrent downloading from your home computer to the seedbox, you can do it with ease. Seedboxes come with a VPN connection for you to be able to route all your internet visitors through an encrypted funnel. This means that you can browse the internet in whatever way you want secretly and without anyone knowing.

A seedbox is your best bet if you are a compulsive file sharer. As you must know, torrents are the way the world is viewing entertainment today. Torrent protocols like rTorrent have made it possible for people to access an unlimited number of movies, music, games and e- books for free. All you have to pay for is bandwidth.

Buying a focused seedbox for yourself to use with your rTorrent downloads is a great idea. A focused seedbox will come with loads of other features as well. It will let you stream videos or play music via your internet browser on your seedbox itself. The seedbox will also provide you with advanced remote PC capabilities that will let you control and view your movies, music and play games on your seedbox or television. It also has video encoders and office applications.

The most important reason why more and more people are using the seedbox as an accessory to their rTorrent downloading and uploading is that it gives them speeds they have never experienced before. This is true of both downloading and uploading. If you are someone who downloads torrent files all day long, your expenses on bandwidth must be quite high. A seedbox is a good way to reduce your bandwidth expenses as the time taken to download will get at least halved when you use it.

How can you choose a good, reliable seedbox provider?

Man, can it be so hard, right, it should be easy to choose an reliable seedbox?

Yet we see very high failure rate, as of late RapidSpeeds, Evoboxes, Knowinservers and Boxslots is having some major issues.

YEA, it can be at times. Seedbox market is full of flybys, scams and frauds. There are several tell-tale characteristics to find a reliable, good provider.

To make matters worse, sometimes even the unreliable provider doesn't realize itself it's promising vapor, because of their upstream provider or not to realize the overheads running a business. There is also the providers who are very comfortable lying, and they will run with your money. Consider yourself lucky if a upstream provider does bail them out and save the users day.

You need to be able to distinguish every type of failure so that you can be assured your torrents are up and seeding even tomorrow!

Is the promise too good to be true? It often is, but there is a huge pressure to deliver more for less especially in seedbox market, because customers themselves have outrageously diluted expectations, partially due to overpromising hosts and partially due to a reality distortion field. In most cases the seedbox provider is paying exactly the same for servers as you would get as an average joe - yes, as unbelievable as that is, it is true. There are no magic bullets, or insanely low cost servers providers can tap into.

It simply is not possible to offer a true, dedicated, SLA'd, high quality 1Gbps connection for 10€. Even big companies often paythousands of euros per month for such a connection.

So just to be able to offer a seedbox service for you, stars got to align just right for so many factors.

Torrenting is not lightweight. Most users believe torrents are very lightweight, this couldn't be further from the truth. Seedboxes are primarily used by power users, and there is a lot of users per node, that's when even the fastest HDDs start to crumble.

So what does all that mean? When you see a 1Gbps unmetered, 500Gb Disk space, unlimited torrents seedbox offer for 2€, it probably isn't what you'd expect.

RAID10 yet same amount of storage for money as the average provider? That is very likely not true, tho exceptions do exist such as the Pulsed Media 1Gbps running RAID10 on some nodes.

Do not go with a provider full of spelling mistakes, or if you can spot, technically factual errors. If suspicious, ask around from your friends if that is possible.

What support do they provide? Do they tell you upfront? If they are not upfront about support services and actively market their support, in all likelyhood it's going to suck - at best. At worst, there is no support services in place at all, which is true for sadly many long standing seedbox providers.

Are they real registered company? Did you ask them, and they said yes? Well, did they back that up with Business ID #, and/or Brick And Mortar address + phone number? The latter is not necessary, but former is. If they are not willing to discuss those details, especially if european company, they probably are not a registered, lawful firm. Sometimes they are, even if they don't tell you their Business ID # or VAT ID, but that's the exception not the rule.

Is there "buzz" about them? If not, chances are they are either a really small provider or new. Both entail a big risk. Most of the cases you can find some reviews with simple "company namereview" google search. Take the reviews with a grain of salt tho, as the competition is fierce and often the competition might try to smear campaign their competitors, or at times a bad review is done without even trying to reach support to fix it. If you see negative review, check up on the following commentary about the review.

Do they provide guarantees? Check up on them, upfront. look into footer or ask their pre-sales for those guarantees. Those can be moneyback guarantee, service level agreement or other. Service Level Agreement (SLA) is very rare on seedboxes, but there is providers who give this as well. It means you will be compensated shall there be fatal problems with your service and they can validate the problem.

Don't buy into the Hype, immediately at least. Many up & coming providers are being hyped, more hyped it is, the more likely it is a scam or fraud. Longstanding, stable companies do not produce this kind of hype, but a steady stream of buzz and activity around them. There really is no exception to this rule.

Expect lies. Most Seedbox providers lie, and they lie big. Many will claim to be best, but those who claim to be best, usually are on the worse scale of things. There is some providers who claim this, and their marketing is full of lies. They sell metered, capped service as unmetered, do not even give all the basic services (ie. SSH or SFTP access, or web filemanager), and at times security is less than lax. Those who truly are The Best, do not need to advertise the fact.

Cheapest, is not the best choice. Best value is the best choice. Given high enough value, the offer might also seem insanely cheap, maybe even below cost but in such case there probably is a good, healthy profit margin involved - which is required to provide high value. Every cent higher price, every single cent more per server earned, is directly to profit for the company. Sometimes high enough value offer might seem too good to be true, but if you ask the company or look at the details you might notice how that is possible - and the company offering this earns every single cent of the extra margin.

When in doubt, ask your friends or see if the company offers a 14-day moneyback guarantee. If there is a moneyback guarantee you can quite safely try them out. Sometimes the guarantee is not marketed, and not in so obvious places in order to reserve that right to those who truly need it and not the flock of abusers waiting in line to take advantage. Ask the company about it.