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Seedbox reviews

Seedbox basics

A seed box is a dedicated server which is configured specifically to upload and download torrents. They’re usually used by members of private torrent trackers to help seed torrents to gain upload ratio.

Seedboxes have become increasingly common over the last few years as internet providers clamp down on torrent traffic. A seedbox allows end users to bypass ISP limitations by using a seedbox as a torrenting proxy. The files can later be downloaded off the seedbox via http. Thereby bypassing any ISP restrictions.

Vast array of seedboxes

If you’re looking to purchase a seedbox for yourself you may be inundated with the vast array of differnet services available. In fact there are hundreds of seedboxes with vary degrees of quality and feedback from customers.

So the purpose of this page is to try and help consumers by directing them to be best value and most reliable seedboxes out there.

We will look at factors like reliability, transfer speeds, storage space, connectability and other factors.

WebGUI is also quite important, the WebGUI is the user interface or the torrent client that’s visible to you through the web browser, it allows you to add torrents, which will automatically download and seed them, most seedboxes use rtorrent, however various different servers configure themselves in different ways to offer you very different functionality. We will review the configurations of the torrent clinet in each tracker as well.

Seedstuff – http://www.seedstuff.ca Rating: ★★★★★

It’s really no surprise that I have given seedstuff a 5 star review, because the performance of seedstuff was quite simply, phenominal. It’s also promoted heavily by numerous private torrent trackers, which speaks a lot about it’s performance and reliability.

Another user in a tracker I am members on pm’d me this review.

I live in the Ukraine, and have a slow ISP, with very slow upload speed. My ratios have been suffering a lot and I searched around the web for reviews for seedboxes, seedstuff kept popping up everywhere so I decided to give them a try. All I can say is that the results where phenominal. I was able to jack my ratios up to ridiculous ratios. I heard of some people donating $15 in torrent trackers to boost up 30GB of ratio credits. That’s just ridiculous. Imagine paying $15 to every torrent tracker you’re with. With a seed box I got over 500GB of upload credits in less than a week… AND COUNTING!!!

>> Visit Seedstuff <<

Dedi seedbox – http://dediseedbox.com/ Rating: ★★★★½

Well results speak for themselves, this is the seed using the $15 starter plan. You can pay by paypal and account setup takes just 2 hours. Seeding is really good, you can get up to 7MB/s on their plans. That’s MORE than my ISP download speed. Crazy stuff. In a week I upload nearly 900GB

>> Visit Dedi Seedbox <<

Pulsed Media- http://www.pulsedmedia.com/ Rating: ★★★★½ Pulsed media offer seedbox locations in various locations in Europe and USA, even though I’m from the UK I selected USA, because that’s where most English torrent users are. I just wanted to do a quick test to see how well PM fares against competitors, so I joined up to my favourite torrent tracker and selected a bunch of torrents with high number of leechers and loaded them all up onto the tracker.

It wasn’t really a scientific test, I just let them to seed for a week and logged into every few hours throughout the week to see how well the seed is faring.

  • Max torrent download speed: ~15mb/s [my package limit]
  • Max torrent upload speed: 512kb/s [close to my package limit]
  • Typical/average torrent upload speed: ~350kb/s
  • FTP download speed: max my ISP will allow

The speeds are pretty good, and definitely a great way to increase your ratio. I managed to upload tonnes of data in the space of a week, got up to 200GB worth of upload credits.

>> Join Pulsed Media <<

Notable mentions [recommended to me by other VIP members from torrent trackers, who all use them personally]
 Super seeder – https://superseeder.eu
Seednet.eu – https://www.seednet.eu
Underleech seedboxes – http://www.underleech.org/
Super Seedbox – https://www.superseedbox.co.uk/
Seed cafe – http://www.seedcafe.info

Intro to Online Backup Services

Due to the growth of fast internet speeds, it’s now possible to transmit large amounts of data through the web, and because of that storing backup data online is even more attractive than ever. In this article I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of storing backups online. In this knowledge-base article, we discuss:

 

How do online backup services work?

Online backup services use small applications which manage your data library and automatically upload and retrieve selected files and folders between your computer and online storage server. There are various different providers offering data capacities from just a few Gigabytes to unlimited data allowances. Online backup services typically charge a fixed monthly fee, although opting to pay annually or biannually is often incentivised with small discounts.

An average price for online backup as of Jan 2011 is $5 per month for 30GB of online backup space for home users, for business/elite users the prices are charged per GB of data stored, and is often more expensive than home users gigabyte for gigabyte. Numerous backup providers offer free backup space ranging from a 30 day trial of a full account to 2GB taster accounts which are free for life.

Online backup services would typically supply you with backup management utilities, which are small files that when installed create your backups, either when prompted or automatically after each time you create or modify a file. Before being transmitted the backups are encrypted, and then sent through a secure SSL connection to prevent prying eyes from eavesdropping into the connection and acquiring your data.

The initial backup can take a long time, perhaps days or weeks for the initial backup, however, after the initial backup is made, the subsequent backups are a lot faster because only files that are modified are uploaded to the backup centre. The reason for the delay is that upload speeds can be 8-20X slower than download speeds therefore it takes a while, downloading backups are a lot faster.

It should be noted that the main purpose for backups is to have a full restorable archive of your data, whilst the creation of a backup is generated easily, there’s no knowing if a backup will actually restore fully and correctly, so it’s worth testing your backups periodically.

 

Are online backups safe?

Whilst online backups providers have adequate levels of encryption and secure connectivity to prevent data being handed to malicious parties. It’s important to do further background checks to be as secure as possible.

  • Do a google search on prospective companies looking for reviews and user opinions to find out what others have to say about the company
  • Make sure you have firewalls and antivirus in place beforehand, and ask the backup provider about what firewalls they have in place on their data servers.
  • Find out what backup power measures they have in place in case there is a power outage
  • Enquire into what type of physical security they have on site. Are servers inside a vault or in standard office environment?

 

Why backup anyway?

Backup is essential if you have sensitive data on your computer that you would not be able to replace like work documents, accounts, irreplaceable photos and other less important things like your music collection, emails, programs and settings which can be replaced but will take a long time. With good backups at hand it’s possible to reload your data onto your computer in less than an hour.

Traditionally users kept backups on CDs, DVDs and USB drives. Which can be cumbersome and users often forgot to make frequent backups which made a lot of backups useless. They also required you to purchase and install additional hardware, or at least media. Although high capacity USB drives like the Western Digital passport alleviate a lot of these issues.

 

Why Online Backup is a good solution

Online backup takes away a lot of the maintenance issues required by manual backups, additionally they provide a means for businesses and professionals to store their data on a highly secure offsite server, protecting their data from potential data loss caused by theft, floods or fires. Which USB, CD, DVD drives aren’t the best solution for since they are liable to damage as well.

Although there are many inexpensive online backup solutions for home users, business users will need an additional level of support, in order to backup multiple computers. For corporate use online backup really stands apart, it enables employees who work off laptops and have little knowledge of computers to automatically create backups in the background. Too keep valuable business data safe.

 

Advantages and disadvantages of online backup services

While online backup is great, sensible computer users know that with data loss anything can happen, and it’s still worth performing occasional full system backups, and using a combination of different backup methods is ideal.

Advantages

  • Backup and recovery is a lot simpler and requires very little technical knowhow compared to traditional CD/DVD based backups.
  • Many providers keep old versions of files either on a 30 day basis or 5 version limits for instance, which can be handy if you omit information on a recent file and need to look into an older version.
  • Can work out cheaper than traditional backup methods, as you bypass the hardware cost, and specialised backup software cost.
  • Installation and set up is designed for entry level computer users and is easy to perform
  • Backups are automatic and require no maintenance
  • Data is kept secure on an offsite server

Disadvantages

  • Requires an internet connection
  • Ongoing monthly cost can appear to be prohibitively expensive.
  • Backup speeds are restricted to your internet speeds, dial up users probably wouldn’t want to consider online backup. Secondly most broadband/adsl users tend to have upload speeds up to 8-20X slower than download speeds. So backup uploads will take a lot longer than the speed which users are used to download at.
  • You put the trust of your backups on a third party to create and manage your backups as opposed to yourself.

 

A few more tips to help you work out the ideal backup provider for you.

There are a few factors to consider when choosing an online backups provider.

  • Does it support the computer systems you use?
  • How many computers do you intend on backing up? And how many mobile devices?
  • Do you plan to use your backup service as a synchronization facility to sync your files between multiple computers
  • How many users do you want to include in your backup plan?
  • Availability or range or support services available
  • Does the server allow automatic backups to be made?
  • Do you need systems files and settings to be backup up online such as your browsers bookers, auto fill passwords, windows settings etc.
  • Are the costs suitable to you?
  • What are your legal requirements and restrictions for backup? E.g. EU users cannot store business related backups on non-EU computers.

There are many online backup reviews available for you to browse through to help you pinpoint the exact backup services that fit your criteria.