Speed Up Your Torrent Downloads, Get a Seedbox

Written by sharky on July 15, 2008 

A seedbox is BitTorrent jargon for a dedicated high-speed server, used exclusively for torrent transfers. With a seedbox you’ll be able to download and upload faster than you ever imagined. Additionally, you can manage your torrents through a browser from anywhere, anytime.

Seedboxes are not something every BitTorrent user wants or needs. They are mostly for people who share a lot of files, and those who want to keep a good ratio on one of the elite private BitTorrent trackers.

The downside to having a seedbox is of course that they are not free. To some this isn’t a problem, “I pay for my Internet connection, so why not pay a few extra bucks to get the best out of it,” is an argument we often hear. Others, however, are satisfied with the speeds they get, and don’t want to pay extra for BitTorrent traffic.

So why should people use these seedboxes? What are the benefits? Here are some of the advantages.

1. Competition.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, users on private trackers are extremely competitive. No matter how many torrents you have seeding, or how you’ve managed to tweak the BitTorrent client settings, there’s just no competing with the uploading power of a seedbox. With many elite private trackers, a seedbox is not just recommended, they’re almost essential for account longevity.

2. Speed.

Most seedboxes are on 100Mbit lines, which makes them really fast. Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access - unless you live in Japan or Sweden, that is. You can sit back, relax and watch in amazement at how fast the torrents finish. Gigabyte files will be downloaded in minutes, practically without limitations. Of course, you’ll still be limited to the speed of your home connection when you want to transfer these files from the server to your computer.

3. Uploading.

Some users of private trackers are less concerned about the downloading, and more about seeding. Good ratios are crucial to a healthy membership - without them, the account will wither away and die. With a seedbox, your ratio will be 1:1 within minutes, not days. 10:1 ratios are not uncommon within the first hour for popular torrents. No more do you have to seed the torrent for weeks just to stay in the good graces with your private tracker. You’ll be free to delete seeding torrents, and replace them with other ones.

4. No more throttling and bandwidth limiting ISPs

ISPs like Comcast are known to throttle your BitTorrent traffic, and they will soon introduce a monthly bandwidth limit of 100GB. With a seedbox you can bypass these limitations. Your seedbox traffic is not counted towards your ISP account stats and won’t be throttled. The only time it becomes ‘your’ traffic is when you choose to download the files from a finished torrent to your home PC, and uploading torrent traffic will not eat into your cap.

5. They’re Secure & Safe

With a seedbox, you don’t even need to use a BitTorrent client on your home computer - your worries about the RIAA or MPAA spying on you are over. No more DMCA notices or warning letters from your ISP - and more importantly, no lawsuit letters will be coming either.

Where to get a Seedbox…

Seedboxes aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank. Many services now offer a ‘torrent-specific’ seedbox packages that are great for entry-level users, and include the ‘TorrentFlux’ interface for easy setup and torrent management. Here are some affordable TorrentFlux hosting solutions:

  • www.seedboxhosting.com
  • http://wewillhostit.com
  • www.w00tsite.com
  • www.leasetorrent.com
  • These are only a few of the many options of course. Another option would be to install a web-based BitTorrent client like TorrentFlux on a server yourself. Happy torrenting…

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    91 Responses

    Pages: [1] 2 3 4 » Show All

    1 Jul 15, 2008 at 22:57 by A

    A seedbox sounds very convenient.

    BTW, there is a grammar error under “Where to get a Seedbox…”

    “But they doesn’t have to break the bank”

    ;)

    2 Jul 15, 2008 at 22:59 by Ernesto

    error fixed ;) thanks

    3 Jul 15, 2008 at 22:59 by mz

    This advertisement brought to you by …

    4 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:00 by Anonymous

    As per #5. the dmca notice and copyright violations likely now go to the host, which then then send to you or take down your box depending.

    5 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:01 by miggyb

    Just get a barebones kit from Newegg or something, and install Debian on it with rtorrent running 24/7.

    Problem solved.

    6 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:17 by x

    http://www.seed-hosting.com/

    :)

    7 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:20 by ..

    Unless you have a very fast home connection, these are somewhat useless as like it says.. your still limited to your home connection..

    sure it will technically download faster and then you have a good download speed from the seed box itself.. but once everything is said and done, i doubt you would have saved enough time to justify paying for it.. unless your worried about security.. which I highly doubt will live up to its claims.

    If your paying for it, it can be traced, and it CAN be used against you.

    YES they may not be able to say WHAT you downloaded from the seedbox.. but if you havnt learned anything.. it doesnt matter.. they can claim anything they F*cking want.. your ass will get sued. They DONT HAVE TO PROVE you did anything! All they have to say is.. HE COULD HAVE.. and your done. FACT.

    I think that if you have a fast home connection this could be worth it.. but no matter which way you spin it its probly not going to make that huge of a difference to justify the money (because you have to pay for the expensive high speed aswell)

    I think that in the right circumstances and the right time, this could be very usefull. But as far as replacing your torrent client just to download some shit.. nope. (And I know thats not what there claiming, im just giving my 2 cents)

    8 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:27 by NA

    I’d rather just pay the fee to join a good newsgroup, rather than have to download something twice.

    9 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:34 by justone

    Okey… not very good blogpost today from TF, it is really looks like adversite for some low end providers of seedboxes…

    Everyone who use seedboxes knows, what best sedboxes sels leaseweb, vectoral.info, owh and some other providers.

    Almost every site private site, have forum post about seedboxes and providers.

    10 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:35 by x

    Seedboxes are mainly used by people on private trackers who are Uploaders, so they can distribute everything quickly right after it pre’s…

    11 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:41 by http://TehConnection.eu

    Why spent hundreds to thousands of dollars a year using a seedbox on some elite tracker, when you can use your home line and maintain an awesome ratio? All you need is a site big enough! Those 1337 shitty trackers with 1000-5000 users are worthless, big trackers like

    http://TehConnection.eu will allow you to maintain a perfect ratio on even a 56k.

    Be sure to check it out!

    12 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:42 by MM420

    Comcast is considering a 250GB cap…NOT a 100GB cap as mentioned in this write up.

    13 Jul 15, 2008 at 23:48 by lulz

    Or you could just pay for usenet acceess. Cheaper, just as fast, 0 chance of recieving an infringement notice, and nothing to seed back. You can still upload, but without needing to get a decent swarm together before stopping uploading, and no ratio whores waving their epenis around like it means something to anyone other than themselves.

    14 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:04 by Tom

    I like how the URL says 10 reasons, but since you guys only came up with 5 you changed the title :)

    15 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:13 by Jordi

    This seedbox hoster powns everybody out!!

    http://mybox.pfcorner.eu

    Check it out Folks :)

    16 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:17 by b0ne

    “your worries about the RIAA or MPAA spying on you are over. No more DMCA notices or warning letters from your ISP - and more importantly, no lawsuit letters will be coming either.”

    BLATANTLY WRONG! The process to obtain your customer information is the same. Some how transferring money in the form of payment for a service to a dedicated hosting provider is different than paying your cable provider? Guess again.

    17 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:48 by legal torrent user

    I manage distributing very large (4GB) files to a small set of users (~30) around the world. I regularly use home grown seed boxes to ensure that my users get the fastest downloads possible. I am absolutely interested in in finding a service that can handle it for me. I would love to find a service that provides a single interface for multiple seeders (east coast, west coast, England and India would be perfect).

    Thanks for the informative article!

    18 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:52 by blackied

    On the other hand, when you have cases like in australia where everyone is stuck on <20gb caps (incl. uploads), seedboxes start making a lot more sense.

    19 Jul 16, 2008 at 00:57 by www.eZee.se

    “Most seedboxes are on 100Mbit lines, which makes them really fast. Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access - unless you live in Japan or Sweden, that is.”

    was starting to wonder if you were smoking some crap with “Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access” … because I’m on a 100mb line and its really common here… till i saw “unless you live in Sweden” :)

    I sometimes forget there are less fortunate souls out there, and some even less fortunate cursed by bastards like Comcast… to them I say: dont worry my brothers and sisters, we shall try to take up the slack here to give the MAFIAA a royal pain in the ass :)

    Cheers!
    http://www.ezee.se

    20 Jul 16, 2008 at 01:12 by Anonymous

    a potentially great use for seedboxes is in taking advantage of offpeak bandwidth limits from your ISP. For instance, I get 300gb limit offpeak and only 30gb onpeak (10%), but I’ve never made it to even 20% of my offpeak limitation due to the speed of bittorrent combined with my connection (my max upload speed is 5% of my download speed), yet I usually exceed my onpeak limit.

    A seedbox would allow me to make maximum use out of my ISPs generous offpeak allowance - I could otherwise only manage to download 100% of offpeak time using 100% of my download speed by using newsgroups or something.

    21 Jul 16, 2008 at 01:55 by Anonymous

    > “Just get a barebones kit from Newegg or something, and install Debian on it with rtorrent running 24/7.

    Problem solved.”

    That doesn’t solve the problem, unless you can take that computer and put it in some datacenter in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. Otherwise you’ve just got another computer on your home connection and it doesn’t really help.

    22 Jul 16, 2008 at 02:13 by h33t

    this is a trap

    traceroutes on all the sites listed in the article show the servers based in USA

    google the sites and see how few results each site gets, these sites are new without traffic

    100MB unlimited for less than $50/month is too good to be true? do the research on how much a 100MB unlimited actually costs and you are talking 20x the price on a good deal

    anyone who signs up with these people and sets up a seedbox is a fool. not only do you give them all your logs and filesharing records but they have your content too

    REAL SEEDBOXES COST $100/MONTH FOR 1GB RAM 360GB DISK 5MBPS UNLIMITED. TRY AN OFFSHORE HOST WHO ACCEPTS ANONYMOUS PAYPAL IE. LEASEWEB.COM

    torrentfreak, shame on you getting buttfuked in public

    be real guys

    http://www.h33t.com where filesharing is safe

    23 Jul 16, 2008 at 02:50 by wth

    they’re doing commercials now?
    this doesnt smell too good

    also,
    http://seedboxhosting.com/seedbox/

    familiar design on that page…..

    24 Jul 16, 2008 at 03:23 by CFultz

    in addition to torrentflux, uTorrent has a very functional WebUI that i use. it even has a facebook plugin so you can keep up with your downloads on there instead of going to the ip address and logging in. just a thought… i have a seedbox at home and i love it. even though like stated above its not as fast as it could be but it’s fast enough lol.

    utorrent.com for the webui

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