FAQ

What is a seedbox?

A seedbox is a dedicated server at a high speed datacenter with a public IP address for the downloading and seeding of bittorrent files. Persons who have access to a seedbox can download these files to their personal computers at any time and from any place that has an internet connection.

Our seedboxes run on the Linux operating system which helps to make them fast, inexpensive and secure. However, you do not need to know anything about Linux to use them. Unlike many hosting companies that just give you a server and expect you to know how to administrate it, Seedbox Hosting seedboxes are easy to use right over the web. Just like Gmail or Hotmail, our seedboxes work right over the web, giving you full control of the power of a seedbox right from your web browser.

Who uses seedboxes and why?

More and more people are using seedboxes every day.  Since seedboxes upload files at high speeds, most private bittorrent tracker sites use them as a favor to their members by ensuring high download speeds. When a file is first introduced to a network of potential downloaders, a new version of the Ubuntu ISO for instance, it is often a seedbox that provides the high-speed bandwidth for the initial swarm to grab and seed the file. However, anyone can use a seedbox. If you are a member of a site that places value on a good upload to download ratio, a seedbox will help put you on the right side of that equation.

What setup will I need to do once I get my seedbox?

Every seedboxhosting.com seedbox is set up for each customer free of charge and comes ready to go. Absolutely no setup needed.

What kind of speeds can I expect with my seedbox?

We focus on providing competitively priced servers that are able to seed at decent speeds. Sometimes our connections can provide sustained 1500 - 3000kB/s speeds. At times speeds can be higher. However in practice, most of the time people only end up using an average of 300kB/s to 1000kB/s. We are on an incredibly fast network but our seedbox speeds are limited primarily because of disk I/O. We partition out disk drives between virtual private servers and these frequently become saturated to the point that the network is much faster than the disk I/O. If you are looking for the fastest speed on the block you will probably want to set up your own dedicated server and install and maintain the server yourself. What our customers love about our product is being able to load up torrents and forget about it - knowing their ratio is taken care of.

Another reason for perceived slow speeds is that we only allow private trackers. There is forced sharing ratio on most private trackers that makes people eager to seed. It is often hard to get huge upload speeds because of the large number of seeders. People like our seedboxes however because it is so easy to seed many torrents for long periods of time at decent speeds without any risk of going over any bandwidth limits. There are no limits with Seedbox Hosting.

Why don’t you limit the number of simultaneous torrents customers can run?

Our accounts come with 250mb of memory, which works fine for about 40 - 50 connections and up to about 30 or so torrents seeding. This will not work, however, if all the torrents are all uploading at the same time. You need to limit those torrents constantly uploading or downloading to about 5 or 10. There are many, many settings available. By fine tuning your server, you can move a lot of data, but if you just open up everything without limits, your server will quickly run out of memory and start to suck. This is a powerful tool and needs a bit of skill to run well. That being said, you are smart enough and will rapidly become an expert.

Update: We now have a bigger seedbox available with double the memory and double the disk space for downloading and seeding more torrents at the same time

What version of Torrentflux are you running? And what versions of the backend bittorrent clients are available to me?

Our seedboxes come with a default installation of the latest released Torrentflux-b4rt (1.0-beta2). This includes these versions of the back end bittorrent clients: BitTornado 0.3.18 + Transmission-1.22 + BitTorrent 5.0.7

Can I connect to my server via FTP or SFTP?

By popular request all our seedboxes now come with FTP as well as SFTP and RSYNC access. You can upload and download using any of these methods.

How can I connect via SFTP?

You can use any SFTP client such as FileZilla or WinSCP.

Host: [Your Server Name].s33db0x.com
Username: admin
Password: [your originally assigned password sent in your welcome email]
Port: 21 (ftp) or 22 (sftp)

Note, even if you change your Torrentflux password, your FTP/SFTP password remains the same.

More information on connecting with FileZilla is here: http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Using

Information on connecting with WinSCP is here: http://winscp.net/eng/docs/faq#connecting_to_the_server

I am a Linux or Mac user and would like to use Rsync. Do you have any examples of how to do this?

rsync -avP admin@your_seebox_name.s33db0x.com: ./

That will put everything from the home directory on the seedbox to the current working directory on your local machine.

Because the home directory for the ‘admin’ user on these servers is /home/torrentflux/incoming the above command is the same thing as this:

rsync -avP admin@your_seedbox_name.s33db0x.com:/home/torrentflux/incoming ./

This is also helpful:

rsync -avP admin@your_seedbox_name.s33db0x.com:Ubuntu* ./

That will copy all files or directories starting with “/home/torrentflux/incoming/Ubuntu” down to your local computer.

To copy files from your local directory to the seedbox, just reverse it so it looks like this:

rsync -avP local_directory admin@your_seedbox_name.s33db0x.com:

Can I use the seedbox for public trackers?

Nope. Private trackers only. Most people don’t need a seedbox for public trackers, but occasionally we come across someone who wants to seed to public trackers. We are able to keep our bandwidth costs down and faster speeds for everyone if we restrict it to private trackers only.

Can I create new torrents on the seedbox?

Yes, you can create torrents using Torrentflux on the seedbox. However, our seedboxes are tuned for seeding rather than creating torrents. Most of our customers create torrents on their local computer and upload to the seedboxes for seeding. This is how we are able to offer great speeds at low prices.

We do offer our Big Seedbox server now which has 2 virtual cpus, twice the ram and twice the hard disk space. In perfect conditions, these have tested at about 40% faster for creating a torrent. But again, you still can’t do multiple torrents at the same time or even access the web interface while creating a torrent. If you are very serious about creating lots of torrents on a server, you might consider your own dedicated physical server.

Our main focus is allowing people to seed torrents at great speeds for a competitive price.

Is Wget installed on the seedboxes?

Yes, Wget is installed on all our seedboxes.

Will I be able to unrar files on my seedbox?

Yes, each seedbox comes with software preinstalled that will allow you to unrar your files.

I have more questions. Where can I get them answered?

There is a link to the Torrentflux manual on the home page of each seedbox. It is also here:
http://tfbmanual.munk.me.uk/ref/user.html

The Torrentflux forums are another great place for learning about Torrentflux.
http://tf-b4rt.berlios.de/forum/

If you can’t find your answer in either of those places, or you just want to talk to a friendly person, email us here:

info [at] seedboxhosting [dot] com