Ultimate Seedbox FAQ

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.

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 , 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:
TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux

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:

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.

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.

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.