Seedbox comparison – Scaleway, Feral Hosting, Pulsed Media, Online.net, Time4VPS

[Archiee]

As I got some private tracker accounts now, I thought it is a good time to get a seedbox. So I decided to have a little play with a few and choose the one I like most. I am primarily interested in two scenarios: long term seeding of relatively popular torrents and short term racing on auto download. Both can be used to build up a good ratio. This review will consider the first scenario.

In my choice of seedboxes for the first test I had a few constraints in mind. I wanted pure torrenting, no Plex or any other streaming. It’s fine if the box is powerful enough to transcode, however most of my viewing and listening happens to be at home so it makes sense to stream from home as much as possible. Storage size does not particularly matter for the test, however for the final choice I need 2TB minimum. For comparison I calculated the price of a 2TB option including any VAT, and converted everything to Euro.

For long term seeding available upload bandwidth is perhaps less important, 100Mbit plus should be fine. The test box has to be reasonably priced as I want to compare as many as possible within the budget. I ended up with a month’s subscription for the following five boxes.

SC QB: Scaleway S2C, 50GB SSD storage, 300Mbps bandwidth, dedicated, EUR 14.39 pcm, 2TB cost EUR 61.19 pcm.
FH He: Feral Hosting Helium, 1TB HDD storage, 1Gbps bandwidth, shared, GBP 10.00 pcm, 2TB cost EUR 22.30 pcm.
PM M1000: Pulsed Media M1000S, 2TB HDD storage, 1Gbps bandwidth, shared, EUR 11.99 pcm, 2TB cost EUR 11.99 pcm
ON SC2016: Online.net SC2016, 1TB HDD storage, 1Gbps bandwidth, dedicated, EUR 10.79 pcm, 2TB cost EUR 21.58 pcm
TV ST1: Time4VPS Storage VPS, 1TB HDD storage, 100Mbps bandwidth, OpenVZ VPS, EUR 7.19 pcm, 2 TB cost EUR 14.39 pcm.

I ran rtorrent with rutorrent on all boxes apart from Time4VPS where I used transmission – don’t ask me why, it just happened.
The first file I tried was Ubuntu desktop 17.04 ISO - ubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso, size 1.49GB. Most leechers will be on relatively slow home connections for this one. I ran this one for seven days, and here are upload results day by day, all in MB.

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Total
SC QB 1727 960 1660 3580 3540 3100 2850 17417
FH He 1921 1110 2220 2610 4730 3840 5510 21941
PM M1000 2612 1280 2150 3100 5190 8060 5890 28282
ON SC2016 1704 1490 1590 8000 1580 3470 4130 21964
TV ST1 2347 3130 2870 3010 3400 2200 2600 19557

The next file is Ubuntu server distribution ubuntu-17.04-server-amd64.iso, size 685MB. There are quite a few fast leechers on this torrent, presumably server boxes on fast external connections. Again this was ran for seven days with the following results.

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Total
SC QB 568 199 245 138 270 80 110 1610
FH He 165 111 80 54 356 565 250 1581
PM M1000 503 524 560 220 210 350 300 2667
ON SC2016 206 38 133 518 105 510 150 1660
TV ST1 293 444 320 150 380 220 270 2077

The results speak for themselves, however we still need a slightly more scientific overall comparison. I will skip the boring maths bit with distributions etc. In a nutshell, I took every total upload value and normalised it to 1.0 for each torrent – so the that the biggest upload gets 1.0 and all others are proportionately smaller. This allowed me to give the results an equal weight for both torrents, regardless of the size. To get a combined score I multiplied the numbers for both torrents, this emphasizes the best overall performance. Here we are:

Performance Price 2TB
SC QB 37% 61.19
FH He 46% 22.30
PM M1000 100% 11.99
ON SC2016 48% 21.58
TV ST1 54% 14.39

The result is shocking but very clear – the more you pay the less you get. Please don’t get wound up ��, the result is only valid in this particular scenario. Your mileage may of course vary dependent on the torrent, leechers present at the time, choice and configuration of BitTorrent client, network conditions etc. There may be better choices I missed, my budget and time is sadly limited. And another thing is clear - I can't format a bloody message. It all looked nice in a spreadsheet, if you know how to insert tables or align columns please let me know and I will 

All that said, Pulsed Media M1000 appears to be a clear winner for both torrents tested, by a wide margin. It also appears to be the cheapest, and this is the one I am keeping.

This is it for now, I need to get some more money ready for some superfast seedboxes and do a racing test.