Seedbox Non owner and Owner FAQ

The Non-Owner FAQ

So you are curious about seedboxes but not sure where to start?

This is information collected to help you understand how they work before jumping into the swarm.

What is a seedbox?

A seedbox is the term for when users of the torrent community use a dedicated server or VPS to increase their upload on trackers. A seedbox normally has a very fast connection (anywhere between 10Mb/s to 1000Mb/s) and is accessed remotely by the user. They can be rented on a month by month or yearly basis. The fast speed allows for users to achieve high ratios on torrents very easily, thus increasing their upload to the tracker.

Seedboxes can range anywhere from ~$40 a month all the way up to however large your check book is. The cream of the crop servers are the latest technology processors with terabytes of hard drive space and a 1Gb/s (1000Mb/s) or even a 2Gb/s connection.

Do I need a seedbox?

Seedboxes aren't just for buffering an account, a large number of users use them in order to keep their home IP address out of the swarm. They also use them if their home connection cant handle the stress caused by the large amount of BT traffic. They are very beneficial to users who have poor home connections where it would cost more a month to upgrade your home internet connection then purchasing a seedbox to do the work for you.

How large a buffer can I get my accounts in one month?

If you are using a dedicated server, you can get anywhere from 500gb to 8tb on a single account. It all depends on how you have your box set up.

With VPS you can expect 500gb to about 3.5TB.

This all depends highly on how active the tracker is and how fast you seed the torrents. Hence why RSS/irc filtering is highly recommended for sites that have it.

Whats the difference between dedicated and VPS?

Dedicated Serves are a computer that only you have access to. You have your own individual connection to the network, have complete control over resources, and pay a premium for it.

VPS is a virtual server, meaning there is 1 computer and 4 users have access to that computers resources. Each user has its own hard drive space and own desktop, however system resources are shared between them all. These usually have 2 100Mb/s lines connected to them in order to deal with the extra traffic generated by the added number of users. These setups are very cheap compared to the dedicated boxes.

Whats the best provider for seedboxes?

Spoiler: Show

To help users here decide which company to go with, there will be a ranking system, with reviews, for most of the major dedicated server providers. There will be a separate thread for VPS (Virtual servers, shared connections)


Level 1 = Not Recommended
Level 5 = Highly Recommended

Level 1

keyweb

Level 2

Dedibox

Level 3

layeredtech

Level 4

Vectoral leaseweb

Level 5

OvH Hosting-ie

Explanation of ranks:

Spoiler: Show

Few updates:

Hosting ie has moved to level 5, the value of the boxes through them is amazing. A few members have let me use their boxes to test them out and I give them a perfect rating (just as good as OvH when we ran 100mb test files between servers).

Pros: Bang for buck: You get really good hardware for what you spend
Cons: Support isnt that good, not offering 1gb/s

Vectoral will stay at level 4:
Pro's: Fast setup, reliable, good support
Con's: hardware is ancient and outdated, you pay too much for what you get

OVH will stay at level 5:
Pros: Very fast speeds, decent set up time, good bang for buck
Cons: only available in certian countries, french data center

Leaseweb level 4:
Pros: very nice setups, good support
Cons: way too expensive.

Dedibox down to level 2:
Pros: dirt cheap
Cons: Their datacenters are raided every other day, hardware isnt that great, support doesnt exist.

Keyweb level 1:
Pros: I cant think of any
Cons: Everything, support, cost way too much for what you get, limit bandwidth on you, not reliable.

What type of seedbox should I get?

The thing about seedboxes is they are addictive. It is nice to keep your home connection out of the swarm by using a seedbox and connecting to your seedbox using FTP. If you are going to use it for one month, the set up you will want will be very different then if you want to keep a server for a while. Usually when people use a server just for a month, they want to do a great deal of traffic in a very short amount of time. This is called buffering accounts.

If you are using it for a 1 time deal, you'll want to get very good specs and you will pay a premium.

Recommended set up:
Dedicated, not VPS
100mb/s connection
SATA Hard drive (at least 80gb)
non-metered
2gb of ram is recommended however you can survive with 1gb

Total traffic per month~ Easy 4-7TB

If you are going to keep it for a while, you can do lower stats as you will not be needing to seed every torrent to 15.0 ratio, your serve wont be as good as the above, but it will easily do 6mb/s uploading and keep seeding away. It also will be a great deal cheaper then the above.

Recommended set up:
VPS
100mb/s connection shared
IDE or SATA...obviously SATA is better, but IDE is fine for this set up
1gb ram is recommended however you can survive with 512mb

Total traffic per month ~2-4tb

I heard Linux is better for seedboxes, should I go learn it instead of just using windows on mine? Will it really make a difference?

If you don't know linux, then just use windows. There is no point in attempting to learn linux if you can just use remote desktop. Linux and windows both work about equal as far as the average user needs to be concerned about. You will seed just as much with both, as long as your settings are correct.

If I am on a tight budget, what is the most important factor for my seedbox?

Tight budget seedboxes need memory. At least 1gb memory for any seedbox is highly recommend. A lower priced seedbox will have an 40gb IDE hard drive, therefore you will also need to cap your downloading in order to prevent data corruption issues. Usually 4mb/s for any files over 3gb is good. Anything lower can be uncapped.




The Owner FAQ


I just got my seedbox log in information...what do I do now?

(This is for windows, if you have linux and could make a tutorial, pm me and Ill edit it in and credit you :-D, preferably one with wine/utorrent and then one with rtorrent)

For either operating system, please do this:
Keep that OS safe!
http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_wi...ID=scg10.3.1.1

Encrypt that hard drive:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

1. Log in using remote desktop using the IP address and log in information given to you by your provider.

2. Download and install the latest version of uTorrent. Click Here

3. Set the connection settings to these:

http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/1...ettingscf2.jpg

4. Adjust any other settings that you want via personal preference.

5. Download some torrent files and begin!


How do I get my files off of my seedbox to my house?

You use an FTP. There is a complete guide for this (click here).

I have a seedbox, but I keep getting disk overload and my speeds drop off the charts. Why Does this happen and how do I fix it?

What is happening is that your bit torrent client is downloading faster then your hard drive can write to the disk. This usually happens with IDE hard drives when the memory set aside to buffer the disk becomes full. The data comes into the server too fast and the server doesn't know what to do with it so it just loses data.

How to fix it.

1. First, do a clean install of utorrent to clean out any custom settings you may have adjusted. As something might be corrupt. Then set the connection settings to how they are in the picture below if you have a dedicated box. If you are on VPS, start at the default recommended settings for xx/100Mb. Check to see if it still happens. If it still does, proceed to step 2.

http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/1...ettingscf2.jpg

2. Check all the boxes like they are in the image below. If you have 1gb of ram in your server, set the cache to what it is in the image. If you have 512mb. Set it to 150mb. Check and see if it happens still. If it does Proceed to step 3.

http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/884/overloadif6.jpg

3. If the first two options didnt work, then it is a hard disk issue. Run various hard disk analysis tools to see if the disk is working 100% correctly. If it is, your download speed just is too much for the disk write speed. So you will have to limit your download on large files such as anything over 4gb limit the global download speed to 3mb/s and watch it for a while.

If you start to see all your uploading approach zero, then decrease the download speed to 2.5mb/s. That is a sign that the disk cant keep up.
If everything is stable at 3Mb/s, try 3.5Mb/s and continue tweaking back and forth until you are stable.

I have found that with my vectoral box, 4.3Mb/s seems to be the sweet spot where I will still be able to upload/download at the same speeds for anything over 4gb.


I get to 99.9% and my internet traffic stops for a few minutes and then once that file says 100% it comes back, how come and can I fix this?

This happens because your memory is buffering the download when you are downloading faster then your hard drive can write. There is no known fix, however, you can limit your download speed accordingly to remove it. Personally, I just deal with it for the 1 minute on the rare occasion it happens as downloading it faster is more important to me, so I can share it on other sites, not just where I downloaded it from.

Thanks. Nice info here. Well written.

ty

thank you

First non-spam post I've seen from you fatact.. :lol:
Well done!

Very nice guides ,fatcat. :) thank you.

nice guide man thanks just the info i was looking for

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pro267

First non-spam post I've seen from you fatact.. :lol:
Well done!

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Lets be honest here...this is my second. The other tutorial was done before this :lol::lol::lol:

Thanks fatcat69 for this tutorial. Maybe after this i get a seedbox.

thank you very much man this is great info

Interesting information. Thanks for the writeup.

Nice man thanks - maybe one day with a guide like this I'll try a box (and of course when I find the money!) :D

thx very much, it help alot ;)

How much ram would a Linux seedbox and a Windows one would need to run uTorrent?

hi
very well done..good one this was the tutorial i have been looking 4 ..now i can buy a seedbox....thanx a million

Quote:

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Originally Posted by renwickftw

How much ram would a Linux seedbox and a Windows one would need to run uTorrent?

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I have had a linux box running 256ram fine.

But I recommend 512mb for linux

1gb for windows.

Thanks for this excellent tutorial.

I've got a couple questions for you if you don't mind...

I've been comparing both Hosting-IE & OVH.co.uk

Seems to me that Hosting IE has expensive set up fees, while
OVH.co.uk has no set up fees.

I'm comparing these 2 servers:

1. Dedic Raptor Pro Lin 577 ( Hosting-IE )

2. START 100M LARGE ++ ( OVH.co.uk )

OVH has a lower monthly price, and you get a much BIGGER hard drive,
and 2 GB Ram.

I've been hearing rumors that OVH caps your upload speeds, care to shed
some light on these rumors?

I'm really leaning towards OVH, but I don't want my up speeds to be capped,
if the up speeds are capped, than they don't truly provide unlimited bandwidth.

Also, is there a 100 MB/s server that you may recommend? ( Budget 75 Euros per month )

I almost went with Vectoral until I read your review about ancient hardware.

Though I heard they have amazing speeds, but they only give you 3000 GB
bandwidth per month.

Are both OVH & Hosting IE truly unlimited bandwidth?

Thanks in advance,

Sam

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sam45

Thanks for this excellent tutorial.

I've got a couple questions for you if you don't mind...

I've been comparing both Hosting-IE & OVH.co.uk

Seems to me that Hosting IE has expensive set up fees, while
OVH.co.uk has no set up fees.

I'm comparing these 2 servers:

1. Dedic Raptor Pro Lin 577 ( Hosting-IE )

2. START 100M LARGE ++ ( OVH.co.uk )

OVH has a lower monthly price, and you get a much BIGGER hard drive,
and 2 GB Ram.

I've been hearing rumors that OVH caps your upload speeds, care to shed
some light on these rumors?

I'm really leaning towards OVH, but I don't want my up speeds to be capped,
if the up speeds are capped, than they don't truly provide unlimited bandwidth.

Also, is there a 100 MB/s server that you may recommend? ( Budget 75 Euros per month )

I almost went with Vectoral until I read your review about ancient hardware.

Though I heard they have amazing speeds, but they only give you 3000 GB
bandwidth per month.

Are both OVH & Hosting IE truly unlimited bandwidth?

Thanks in advance,

Sam

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K first...vectoral sucks, anyone saying otherwise can go jump off a cliff bc they havent tried a real server.

OvH doesnt limit your bandwidth...people just say that because they cant get their settings set up right. Neither does Hosting-ie.

OvH is a .fr based hosting company....which leads to still the poor peer connection rate...I mean its kick ass for places like BCG or higher user sites....but for your seedbox sites, youll get better peer connections with other companies.

Hosting-ie is expensive, but is also better peer connection rate from what I have seen.


If you can buy OvH, then Id say go for it. I have no complaints from my box, as it truly is an upgrade from my vectoral.

I went from a vectoral zephyr to a OvH bottom of the line (kimisufi server, only 256 ram and a 160gb hard drive) and I am maxing out at 11/11 all the time.

For your price range...id recommend the OvH:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/superplan2008plus.xml

Get windows 03 web and you wont be disappointed at all.

Thats what I was going to buy until I got this freebie from OvH.

Thanks for these other recommendations.

I will have to talk to some of my friends from the UK to see if they
can get this rolling for me.

Webhosting IE looks alright, except for their high set up fees,
and I will consider the VPS you recommended as well.

So many options to choose from! :)

That OVH server looks powerful for sure, and I bet it will handle a high
torrent load well. I'm sharing a box with a friend now, but it doesn't
handle a high load very well.

Sam

Found it very useful!
So if I downloaded a file from a tracker to my computer and I want to seed it on my box I have to download it to the box's hard disk too right?
--
I have another question, can you recommend me which seed box is the best for me?
I don't download a lot, biggest number I reached is 40 GB per month, so I don't think that 4TB traffic as you recomended is good for me. I'm looking for a cheap and good seedbox.

From what I learned so far, you're probably better off going with a VPS.

Instead of downloading twice, you would download the torrent to your box, and than
download the files to your computer. That way you're seeding from the box right away.

There's no need to download the torrent twice, doing this may actually raise red
flags with some trackers, that you're sharing your account.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sam45

There's no need to download the torrent twice.

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So how can I download it to my comp and seed from my box too?

this cleared a lot up for me, thanks.

hum..i was looking 4 an explanation like this one!!
thx m8

thanks mate for the tutorial.

This will help me for sure when i buy one seedbox.......

Thanks for the tutorial.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Quarter

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sam45

There's no need to download the torrent twice.

---

So how can I download it to my comp and seed from my box too?

---

Basically, the seedbox is where you would download the torrent file, open it in your bittorrent client, and download the movie/whatever. When the download is complete, it would begin seeding. Also, once the download is done, you would be able to download it to your home PC for viewing (in the case of movie) or whatever. This download process can be done a variety of ways. The easiest of which is probably FTP. On the seedbox you would run an FTP server, like vsftpd, then on your home PC you would use a client like FileZilla to FTP into the seedbox (using its IP address) and download the file. You could also setup an HTTP server like Apache and enable directory-listing, then make your Downloads folder the www-root. If you go the Apache route, I recommend reading up on .htaccess files so you can setup a password for the directory listing, so random web users can't leech your files (and Google can't spider it).

For more on FTP, check this [external: Howtoforge].

Let me know if you have further questions. I don't have much experience with seedboxes yet (still in the process of getting my first one), but I have a home Linux server that I access from work a lot so I've downloaded/uploaded tons of things to it using FTP.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chip19

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Quarter

So how can I download it to my comp and seed from my box too?

---

Basically, the seedbox is where you would download the torrent file, open it in your bittorrent client, and download the movie/whatever. When the download is complete, it would begin seeding. Also, once the download is done, you would be able to download it to your home PC for viewing (in the case of movie) or whatever. This download process can be done a variety of ways. The easiest of which is probably FTP. On the seedbox you would run an FTP server, like vsftpd, then on your home PC you would use a client like FileZilla to FTP into the seedbox (using its IP address) and download the file. You could also setup an HTTP server like Apache and enable directory-listing, then make your Downloads folder the www-root. If you go the Apache route, I recommend reading up on .htaccess files so you can setup a password for the directory listing, so random web users can't leech your files (and Google can't spider it).

For more on FTP, check this [external: Howtoforge].

Let me know if you have further questions. I don't have much experience with seedboxes yet (still in the process of getting my first one), but I have a home Linux server that I access from work a lot so I've downloaded/uploaded tons of things to it using FTP.

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Wow. thank you very much!
You helped me a lot and enriched my knowledge!
So once again can any one recommend me a seedbox?

Quote:

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can you recommend me which seed box is the best for me?
I don't download a lot, biggest number I reached is 40 GB per month, so I don't think that 4TB traffic as you recomended is good for me. I'm looking for a cheap and good seedbox.

---

Thanks for the info

nice guides ,fatcat. thank you.

nice ! really good to know !

Thanks, awsome info, now i might get one ;D

Very Very Thanks!!! ;-)

So encrypt the Hard drive.
So where is Utorrent? Inside the encrypted container or outside?
Where are the torrents you seed? Inside or outside?

So if its encrypted.. you log on to the desktop with remote desktop and run truecrypt and enter your password and run utorrent?

So if its running they can see it their end , can't they?
So the benefit of the encryption is ???

I am currently looking into obtaining a seedbox and I found this site: http://myseedbox.info/index.html.

It has a great deal and I'm wondering if this site is legit. Anyone using them?

Thanks for your precious time for this info

Great Thanks

Thanks fatcat69 for this tutorial and i will get it in one month

thats a great info bro....

Nice guide, I'm sure lots of people will find this useful. However, linux is the only way to go when it comes to seedboxes! :P