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Review: PulsedMedia Seedbox
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
This isn't a typical LEB review, because it's not a LEB.
Like many of you, I am vitally concerned with the swift distribution of Linux ISOs. I'm actually a pretty simple p2p guy and am one of those weird humans who seeds fresh content - generally 1930s OTR that may or may not be under copyright, combatting various thieves from popping up, claiming copyright, and DMCAing the world. From the 1930s, people. But I digress. Typical Linux ISOs + I seed a bit...I don't even use plex or sonarr or any of that sophisticated stuff those dreaded millennials natter on about.
I'd been a long time Kimsufi banger, but then justseed.it with its slick interface seduced me. I never deposited enough money to be angry when tristen repeatedly zero'd accounts and started over...but that's happening again with pretty open promises that it'll happen again after that. Also I received a note from a well-known tracker board:
"Our system has flagged you for using a banned client - justseed.it 0.9.1.0"
OK, then. Now I could go back to my Kimsufian ways and there's a 2007 version of me that really wants to salute to @LEAdmin and do so, but (a) I'm getting lazy, (b) OVH network has never been that fantastic for torrenting - certainly serviceable but nothing to write home about, (c) or copy home, which is probably some stupid Comcast-Cogent peering thing but often it's dog slow, and (d) I'm lazy.
So I thought I'd try a proper seedbox like a dumb nontechnical schmoe. I read up on reddit and some review boards and decided to give PulsedMedia a whirl. Specifically the dragon mushu:
http://pulsedmedia.com/1gbps-torrent-seedbox-dragon-2.0.php
Just the 12.99EUR plan - 675GB storage, 7TB bandwidth. BTW, that says quarterly but I just clicked Monthly in WHMCS and the order was provisioned. That have cheaper plans (as low as 4.99EUR) but I figured why not try the speed. This is not a VPS - there's shell access but not root. Some of their other services are VPS-based. I mostly use the rtorrent web client or ssh/sftp/etc.
So what are you getting for that premium price?
- someone who sets up the torrent clients, web interface, etc.
- someone who configures all the hooks (e.g., drop a .torrent here and it's added, etc.)
- someone who tweaks the torrent client for maximum performance
- an unspoken promise that you don't have to worry about DMCAs and all that
- a setup that is purpose-built for torrenting, as opposed to more general purpose dedis. i.e., they're not going to complain about the disk and network load you're putting on them.
Now, is that really 1gbps speed all the time? I don't know, but here's typical performance. I added a 56GB torrent and it took less than 20 minutes, and never dropped below 80MB/sec.
They've been at this for a while and their site is well-organized. Their WHMCS is a little customized and they have nice links there to your service, etc. Welcome email was prompt with details...had one support ticket and got a KB link that answered my quesiton. They have a desktop torrent-forwarding client I haven't tried...overall, their solution mix is great for torrenting, but if you're looking for your own private Netflix with indexing, conversion, etc. you probably want a VM- or dedi-based service. RapidSeedbox looked featureful for this, but no idea if they're good or rubbish.
I don't really care about their servers, but /proc/cpuinfo shows they're using 8-core D-1521 @ 2.40GHz with 24GB RAM on Deb 7 on a lighttpd-based stack.
Overall, I'm satisfied, though I'm aware it's a little pricey. I'll probably eventually go back to my old Kimsufish ways but until I get around to it, I'm happy.
For those in similar markets, here is what else I looked at:
- ChmuraNet - seems to be very well-regarded but much higher starting point
- RapidSeedbox - that was my #2 choice
- Seedboxes.cc and DediSeedbox I also looked at but not deeply
- Evoseedboxes seems to be popular but I couldn't find good reviews, and they don't allow public trackers which isn't critical for me but worth considering.
- Whatbox.ca was interesting as they're a sort of seedbox CDN.
- Seedbox.io was too expensive
The market is huge and who's good today may be awful tomorrow, etc. There are a lot of spreadsheets where you can slice/dice speeds and feeds, but fewer genuine reviews.seedboxgui.de is not a bad resource, but the reality is that you need to search and read. One thing that attracted me to PulsedMedia is that they've been around a while, but even that isn't a guarantee of course.
Comments
Still using my cociu vps with r+rutorrent, no real problems, cheap as chips.
At that price, you should check Feralhosting. Better line and more HDD.
Great review. How's the upload performance? Which location did you pick and what's the network blend like?
I tried out FeralHosting last year for 2 months, was super happy for ~40 days and then disk i/o just went to shit. Downloads were impossible.
I went back to just carving out some space on my OVH/Hetzner boxes, but as you mentioned the network performance isn't always great - and OVH within North America can be an issue depending on ISP.
I saw really mixed review of feral. Weren't they doing free seedboxes for a while? But I haven't tried them personally.
@Harambe I'll have more info on upload later - only been with PM for a little bit and haven't really started seeding yet.
FeralHosting has unmetered at 10Gbit - however this 10Gbit line is shared between hundreds of users on the same server. (256GB RAM, dual E5, etc).
Which one to take?
And that's, gentlemen, what I call a review
What exactly - seedbox in their interpretation? Which difference with VPS?
Halfway through that sentence I switched from getting lazy to full-bore laziness. You saw it happen live!
Brilliant writeup. I have never been one to share Linux ISOs, and with all of the issues of networks and TOS specifically being against anything which has to share public domain (if difficult to find) content, I just haven't bothered. I'll keep this network in mind should I ever leave 2004.
A "seedbox" (as sold as a service) traditionally does not come with root access or dedicated resources.
I'll give it a shot. I think we're cut from the same cloth on this. Can do it myself, don't mind doing it myself, much prefer readymade and convenient solutions. I just don't torrent enough to want to run a server for it.
BTW...
$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on rootfs 20G 3.5G 15G 19% / /dev/root 20G 3.5G 15G 19% / devtmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev tmpfs 3.2G 13M 3.2G 1% /run tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 6.4G 0 6.4G 0% /dev/shm /dev/md3 22T 15T 7.5T 66% /home $ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath] [faulty] md3 : active raid5 sda3[0] sde3[5] sdc3[3] sdd3[2] sdb3[1] 23359102976 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 2048k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU] md2 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdc2[2] sdd2[3] sde2[4] sdb2[1] 20478912 blocks [5/5] [UUUUU] unused devices:Load when I've looked is in the 2-3 range mostly so they're not driving the boxes hot, but that disk layout made me feel very old school lowend. Take your fancypants hardware RAID and your Gray Poupon French Mustard and go back to the Hamptons, ya pukes...
Actually, I truly don't care - it's their headache and I'm monthly :-)
I'm guessing IPT banned you?
Edit: Bytesized has better speeds than feral.
I got the warning PM but not ban. Amusingly, about 24 hours later tristen zero'd my account so by the time I noticed, it had all been sort of automatically resolved.
Can't you just run JSI as Deluge?
I don't know. The issue is really that JSI has gone from "hey welcome along on this wacky adventure and be aware it'll go down sometimes" to "the breeze changed, so all accounts are zero'd and you can learn more if you can find the right phase thread on the right forum which is off on some third party and ha ha ha you shouldn't have trusted me and it's all your fault stupid lusers" etc. I just got tired of it.
I can understand that, I never spent enough money to care that much about whatever shit he pulls. My seedbox with @cociu has quietly been building ratio in anticipation of the day JSI explodes.
Community, please comment with appropriate animated gifs.
It's Cogent, and they use IP-over-Infiniband to save money.
Feral sucks
Whats wrong with IPoIB?
>
Whats your upload speed?
Did you really have to quote the whole damn thing for a one-liner question?
Absolutely!
Oooh. We gots a feisty one here. Nice edit.