Peer to Peer (P2P) BitTorrent is a very
underrated file-sharing piece of technology. Unfortunately, it has gained a bad
reputation because it is widespread among the pirate community. BitTorrent has
been the preferred file-sharing method among those communities because it is
fast, can't be stopped, reliable, and highly scalable.
To work, P2P torrenting needs to expose your IP
address along with the content you are trying to get to the peer swarm. The
go-to solution to remain private and anonymous in the swarm is to use the
popular VPN. And in fact, VPNs do a pretty good job keeping your privacy hidden
while torrenting. But VPNs do only this: hide you behind encryption and
IP-mask— they don't care about your application and its speed.
There is yet another solution, built and
designed around the idea of torrenting experience.
In the BitTorrent world, there are swarms,
peers, seeders, and leechers.
- Swarms are groups of people (peers) participating
towards a single goal: obtaining or sharing the content.
- Seeders have the complete content (100% of the files)
and are active on a swarm. The more seeders there are on a specific
torrent, the faster everyone (peers) will download. But without seeds in
the swarm, there is no content.
- Leechers: They usually have a bad connotation because
they would only come to the swarm to take but not to give. They would come
to download a file and leave as soon as they got it.
Such concepts are vital if you want to
understand seedboxes.
What is a Seedbox?
A Seedbox is a dedicated box, VPS, or server with the purpose of seeding
torrents (seed + box). Seedboxes came into
the scene when sharing started to be an issue.
Closed torrenting communities, known as
private trackers, demand a high sharing ratio and even reward the top sharing
users. But no ordinary user can maintain a high sharing ratio from their home
computer and Internet bandwidth. So, seeders, peers, and recovering leechers :)
started to use powerful cloud-based seedboxes to give back to the torrenting
community.
Although anybody could configure a seedbox
from home, they would require it to be operating 24/7. This would turn out to
be quite challenging for maintenance and operation. However, now you can find
seedbox providers offering impressive degrees of speed, privacy levels, and
additional services, such as streaming, torrent automation, and more.
Why would you need a seedbox?
Being a top sharing user might make you feel
good. After all, you are giving back to the community. However, you are
probably here for another reason.
What’s in it for you?
After all, seedboxes are not free, so why
would you get one?
a. Convenience.
When downloading torrents locally, your computer
and Internet connection speed would ultimately suffer. Seedbox servers leverage
the cloud computing model, where your on-premise resources remain untouched,
and a third-party server does the computation tasks. Seedboxes are convenient
because you can use your computer (or mobile phone) only to log in to your
remote seedbox, monitor or manage your torrents, and then log off. You can load
torrents from a torrent WebGUI anywhere you are. And, when you want to download
a file from a seedbox to your on-premise computer, you can stay away from
BitTorrent and use other methods, like SFTP or FTPS.
b. Crazy Speeds.
Seedboxes are designed for downloading and
uploading torrents, so they would generally have much larger bandwidth
connections, CPU, and memory compared to home-based servers. In addition,
seedbox servers are deployed in high-speed data centers with connections
ranging from 1Gbps, 10Gbps, and even 40Gbps. Something not very common in
residential Internet services. In addition, since a seedbox uses other means to
communicate and transfer content to your home, like SFTP, RSync, HTTP (not
Bittorrent), your ISP won’t be able to throttle the speeds. As opposed to
seedboxes, VPNs would hurt your torrenting performance and speed because VPNs
use your resource, bandwidth, CPU, memory, and traffic data.
c. Torrenting Privacy.
If you are torrenting directly from your computer,
you are likely exposing your information to the torrent swarm. A best practice
to hide your data from the swarm is to mask your IP. And you can do this with a
VPN, proxy, VPS, or a seedbox. However, not all VPNs or Proxy servers allow
torrenting on their servers, due to data regulations. A seedbox, on the other
hand, virtually takes your computer and your Internet connection out of the
torrenting equation. With a seedbox, the traffic from your computer to the ISP
is still an encrypted remote connection, but not an encrypted BitTorrent.
Finally, the IP in the swarm is the seedboxes and not yours.
d. Private Streaming Server.
Long-time torrenters prefer to have a kind of
ownership of the content they are downloading. Having the content on-premises allows
them to play the content over again, even if they are offline. However, a trend
is emerging, and this is streaming. Although most people would still prefer to
download content locally, they are likely to have it stored online somewhere.
Anywhere they have the content, they can use a streaming application like Plex
or Kodi so they can play their content anywhere and on any device. Many seedbox
server providers are beginning to provide VPS seedboxes with streaming media
servers installed so users can stream all content right from the seedbox
instead of downloading it.
What to look for in a seedbox?
Looking for a seedbox? Look for the following
qualities:
- Privacy. Look for seedboxes that provide
a logging policy. If they do, (hopefully) read it carefully! In addition,
look for seedboxes that provide diverse methods for payment, including
Bitcoin and PayPal. Although it is almost a mandatory quality, look for
seedboxes headquartered in countries with data-friendly laws.
- Shared vs. dedicated? Seedboxes
can be provided from a shared server. Usually, a couple of users share
resources from a single bare-metal or VPS server. Or seedboxes can also be
provided as dedicated, where all resources go to a single
connection.
- Managed vs. unmanaged. Some
providers offer an unmanaged VPS, where you have room and flexibility to
install everything from scratch. Others offer a much more friendly
approach: the managed seedbox server, where you don’t install and maintain
anything. Everything is taken care of for you.
- Variety in speed. Look for a
seedbox provider that offers at least 1Gbps of speed. Seedboxes might also
offer 10Gbps (and to 40Gbps).
- Storage. Storage is key. After all, you
are downloading content, so you'll need broad online storage. Storage
varies according to your demands. But generally, seedboxes offer storage
from 1TBs to 5TBs.
- Installed applications. On
the basic level, a seedbox should come with a torrent client, preferably
the rutorrent client. Other key applications
are Plex, OpenVPN, FileZilla, Handbrake, Radarr, Sonarr, etc.
- Permitted traffic. Some
seedbox providers are limited on the amount of data that can go through
their server’s interfaces. Look for seedboxes that give the green light
here. Essentially unlimited is optimal, but anything from 2TB to 20TBs
(per month) will suffice. Again, this depends on your demands.
- CPU and RAM. Seedboxes need robust computing
and processing. Without it, they would have a hard time seeding and
storing content 24/7. Look for seedboxes with optimally 1-4 CPU cores and
at least 2GB RAM.
- Plex support. A key feature if you intend to
build your streaming server. Some seedboxes come with Plex already
installed and claim to start organizing and streaming your content.
