Saw quite a few visitors coming from Whirlpool.net.au, an Australian community forum, from a post asking about seedbox hosting. Now, the term “seedbox” was foreign to me until a few months ago. According to this Wikipedia entry,

A seedbox is a private dedicated server used for the uploading and downloading of digital files. Seedboxes generally make use of the BitTorrent protocol for uploading and downloading, although they have also been used on the eDonkey2000 network. Seedboxes are usually connected to a high speed network, often with a throughput of 100 Mbit/s or more. Files are uploaded to a seedbox from other BitTorrent users, and from there they can be downloaded at high speeds to a user’s personal computer via the HTTP, FTP, SFTP, or rsync protocols.

In another word, a server with fast and stable bandwidth to the Internet so owners can use it as step-stone to download files from P2P network, as traditionally ADSL or cable connection (and their modems) on a residential link is too unreliable to bring back hundreds and thousands of pieces of files you wish to download in a reasonable speed.

Now, are low end virtual servers good candidates for seedbox hosting? Before we get into that, I need to make it clear that downloading copyrighted digital content without copyright holder’s consent is ILLEGAL in many places in the world so don’t do it. I personally do not use bittorrent because I much prefer downloading the minimum-install Linux CD ISO from my local mirror, which is usually only around 150MB :)

Anyway. If you want to use a $5 VPS as a cheap seedbox, I guess the answer is YES. When I need to download stuff using bittorrent I’ll use rTorrent because (1) it’s in command line and you can run it inside screen (2) it uses relatively less memory than the Python reference client. If you are on OpenVZ/Virtuozzo-based VPS you’ll need to watch out for the TCP socket limit though.

$ sudo cat user_beancounters | grep numtcpsock | awk '{print $4;}'
7999992

BT creates a massive number of TCP sockets and some providers might limit the TCP sockets you can have on your VE. Actually, it is a good idea to check your Terms and Conditions of Use before running a P2P client, because some providers explicitly forbid P2P traffic in their network.

HOWEVER, I would hate to share a server with someone running bittorrent though. Physical server IO is shared by all the virtual servers on it and apparently it is harder to limit IO than to throttle CPU usage. Due to the way bittorrent clients are designed, they are seeking, reading and writing everywhere on a big file. End result is that VPS running as seedbox hosting usually uses a lot of IO requests which affects other VPS on the same box (and we are not even talking about all the calculation needed to do checksum). So beware — you might be hated by your neighbours :)

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LEA

The Founder at LowEndBox

The original owner of LowEndBox known as LowEndAdmin or LEA for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource Low End Boxes. After creating the roots of the community that we know today, LEA stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.

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