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Seedboxes
Contents
What is a Seedbox?
So you just got on what.cd and your line at home is fucking trash and you live in a 3rd world shithole so you can't peer, everyone is telling you to get a seedbox and you don't know where to start.
Well, for starters, a seedbox is a server that is dedicated to seeding Linux ISOs and backups of data you already have.
Do you need a seedbox?
Contrary to popular belief, you probably do not need a seedbox to maintain ratio on What.CD. It's really not that hard once you start seeding freeleech torrents. Give it time. Many users get to Elite or even beyond without a seedbox.
However, if you want to climb the ranks at all the good private trackers and/or download a LOT of content, you need a seedbox.
Things to consider when buying a seedbox
There are a few simple things you should look for in a seedbox
- Speed: You want to be able to upload as fast as you can (especially in an initial swarm) so that your ratio for Linux ISOs gets really high, most seedboxes will measure this in Gigabits/second.
- Peering: Similarly you want to be able to connect to as many people as you can in order to maximize your upload potential, there is no real way to measure this.
- Price: I mean come on, for most people spending ~$50 a month for a server to seed backups and Linux ISOs is just not feasible. most of the time you get what you pay for when it comes to seedboxes as it is with any server.
- Storage: Storage is often linked in with price, you often pay more per month to have a higher hard drive quota.
Note, this omits a large amount of detail, actual statistics are further down
- Feralhosting: Well known for being good value for money but mediocre support and known to go down quite often, especially during tracker events, when traffic goes up [1]. Fast seedbox for a decent price.
- Whatbox: Another fan favorite, low storage capacity on their lower plans but very fast speeds, good support and high customization factor make up for it.
- Seedhost: Seedboxes on a fast connection with relatively low disk space, starting as low as 5 EUR/mo. Good if you want to seed a few torrents very fast (for example on Awesome-HD).
- Seedboxco: For masochists that hate having any form of control over their slot. shit support, shit speeds, shit space, shit price.
- Seedboxes.cc: Apparently stupidly fast but also quite expensive.
- Swizards: Touted as being tuned for torrents their seedboxes are apparently very fast but are still outperformed by some dedis, good boxes.
| Provider | Monthly cost | Bandwith | CPU | RAM | HDD (GB) | Network (Gbit/s) | Unstable buffer gain in 24 hours (GB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feral Neon SSD | $21.78 | Unlimited | Shared | Shared | 100 (SSD) | 20 | 256 |
VPS servers
VPS servers usually can serve another purpose, not only being a seedbox. Because of that and low price, some users tend to get VPS, because they can host other things for other purpose, not only for seeding.
- Ramnode: Poor man's VPS/Seedbox. Absolutely dirt poor price, but good for seeding 24/7 if you can't do that from home connection. Be sure to check their AUP as they only allow torrents from certain locations and up to certain speeds.
Dedicated seedboxes
High end dedicated servers will perform better than shared and VPS seedboxes, while lower end ones will be roughly on par. With a dedicated server, you pay for access to a physical server located in a datacenter. They range in performance from little intel boards to big things with multiple processors.
The cheapest dedis start at 4.99EUR/month from Kimsufi and Online.net. Other good dedicated server providers are Leaseweb, Hetzner and OVH (who own SoYouStart and Kimsufi). It's worth shopping around and looking at auctions for dedis, as the prices can vary massively.
Purchasing a dedicated server is not recommendable unless you have at least a basic knowledge of Linux, as you are expected to install and configure the torrent client yourself. A dedicated server may be overkill unless you want to seed large amounts of data at very high speeds.
However, if you are willing to spend upwards of $20/mo, a dedicated server gives you full control over your torrenting. It's worth tweaking the settings of your chosen torrent client to get maximum performance.
Good torrent clients
rtorrent is an efficient and well-performing general purpose torrent client, recommended for most users of dedicated servers. Deluge is a more aggressive seeder (also aggressive RAM eater) and will do better in the initial swarm of a torrent. Transmission handles multiple instances better and is useful if you want to seed more torrents than one rtorrent instance can handle.
All other clients are irrelevant for seedboxes, really.
Setting up a dedicated server
coming soon...
