Three reviews in one! | Seedit4me Sidekick Pro | Seedit4me Ace | Rapidseedbox Lean Swift

[petalmuncher]

Ahoy there, mateys. Aren't the holidays wonderful? Open registrations and global freeleech galore! Perfect for building up ratio.
I took advantage of holiday sales to pick up a few new drives, but I knew they wouldn't arrive for a few more weeks, when global freeleech would have ended. 
So, I thought... What the hell, these are extenuating circumstances, I'll shell out for a seedbox. So I grabbed a Sidekick Pro from seedit4.me, having eyed off their pretty website earlier.
What a blast!! These are my top 5 seeded torrents. 

 

Australian internet is totally puny, so downloading things was lightning fast and I've already uploaded more in just a week than I'd managed to in months at home. It is unbelievably amazing.
I quickly ran out of space and ponied up the extra cash for another terabyte, which was also swiftly gobbled up. 
Payment was easy and things moved very quickly. 

Here's what the dashboard looks like: 


 

All of the -arr apps are there that you always hear people talk about, plus a smorgasbord of media viewers, alternative torrent clients, and nifty tools. Rutorrent is there by default, but I'm a qbittorrent gal, so that's what I went with. 

Clearly things heated up a bit, because I ended up enjoying myself so much that I bit the bullet and picked up an extra box - the Ace plan, with all the bells and whistles. I cannot recommend this highly enough. 
A word of warning, though! Check the rules of your private tracker before you go too nuts!
In my case, I'd just gotten into somewhere new where I found out too late that freeleech torrents didn't count as freeleech if downloaded through a seedbox. 
Before I knew it, I'd gone from 2GB downloaded to 100GB downloaded... and my ratio plummeted to 0.05. 
According to the rules of the site, I had five days to fix my trash ratio, and here's where the fun began.

 

Here's how cross-seeding works. You have a site that has freeleech (or a good buffer), and a site that doesn't.
You look for torrents that are exactly the same on both sites, download from the one that's free, download the .torrent file from the one that isn't, and point it at the content you've already downloaded from elsewhere.
The site now registers that you have a complete copy of the torrent which others can now download from. 
In the above screenshot, red was freeleech, blue was the site I needed urgently to fix my ratio on, but I only had one copy of the listed movies. Aha.
I found tags and categories to be an absolute lifesaver when trying to organise such a massive array of content. 
Creating a category for each private tracker, and tags based on the download status of the torrent, helped me keep track of what needed action and what didn't.

It was around this time that I realised I was running out of space again... and decided to palm off my less-demanding torrents to a third seedbox, which I redeemed from the Member's Shop for an easy 30k points. 
 
 

RapidSeedbox's UI is nowhere near as polished and snazzy as seedit4me, but it does the job. 

 
Qbittorrent's web interface was a little more locked down on this seedbox than on Seedit4me's equivalent tier. On Seedit4me, you can see how much space is left on your box in qbittorrent's status bar, down the bottom.
It's a little extra work to keep an eye on it on RapidSeedbox. I also noticed that my torrents were queued, instead of all going at once - this is probably fine since very few of them are active at a time anyway.
I was also unable to access qbittorrent's settings. Probably just a side effect of being on the basic plan. 

 

With my 6TB seedbox nearly constantly full, I had to figure out what to do. I used FlashFXP to transfer files from one box to another via FTP, getting speeds of around 60Mb/s. 
I also figured out that I could use multiple instances of Filezilla and increase the simultaneous download slots to 10 to slowly drain the files off the seedboxes onto my hard drives at home.
Unfortunately, I pulled out my ethernet cable without thinking about it when moving to a comfier location in the house... and all my transfers failed. 
So I'll have to figure something out. 

I did eventually end up fixing my trash ratio in the nick of time, and I'm delighted to have been able to seed back to the community so much along the way. 
All the seedboxes did exactly what I was hoping - provided a quick spot of refuge for files I didn't have room for while I waited for my drives to arrive. 
At nearly $100 a month AUD, there's no way that seedit4me's best box is sustainable for me long-term - but as a once-off, I'd say it's been absolutely worth the price.
If I hadn't had such a need to guzzle content, I'm sure I would have been just fine with just the Sidekick Pro and the Swift box - but it's been a real treat to be able to enjoy the blazing-fast speeds of Ace.

Where to from now? Waiting patiently for my internet to be upgraded, before I try FTP again to get all my files off. 
The last thing I'll note is that creating torrents was disabled from all three instances of the qbittorrent web UI. I did note a torrent creator tool existed, but it would have been nice to do it the familiar way. 

If you haven't bought a seedbox yet, I hope this overview helped give you an idea of what to expect!
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I'll catch you round. 

[Silent Watcher]

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