With Netflix and other streaming platforms increasing price, I finally decided to get a seedbox for my family members’ needs with Plex/jellyfin.
My budget is 10-15 USD per month. I’m currently on the 11$ hostingby.design plan with 4TB storage and 9TB traffic, 10gbit connection. I’ve been mostly happy but,
- Their app selection feels small though I’ve found most of the mainstream stuff.
- I’m missing things like cross-seed, jellystat, jellyfin-vue, transmission and audiobookshelf.
- Not happy with how apps installed by the GitHub scripts are not available on HTTPS.
- Can’t disable ssh password login for public key, which is making me really uncomfortable.
- Their wiki seems quite sparse.
The other options I’m thinking of are:
- 13$ HDD plan at seedhost.eu - 4TB/9TB but only 1gbps, downgrade in specs but seems to have more apps.
- 14$ plan at ultra.cc with 3TB/8TB but 20gps (which feels like an overkill honestly). Also a downgrade but their wiki/app support looks top notch.
I really wish there was a way I could manage docker containers on my own on a similar shared setup without paying for a dedicated vps but haven’t found something like that so far.
Any advice regarding the other providers, experience or otherwise would be greatly appreciated :)
Don’t think about the speeds advertised by providers, you’ll never come close to them. You seem to require a media server, so give more importance to storage.
From my research comparing HostingBy, SeedHost and Ultra.cc - HostingBy has the highest €/TB rate except for the 1TB box which is ironically the highest €/TB rate
Here’s the Google Sheet if you’re interested Ignore the remarks and INR part, I’m Indian so wanted to see what I would end up paying
I will add on more providers at some point, but these 3 are the big names with decent prices and support.
As for your other problem of app selection, I don’t think you’ll find any of those in most providers natively (except for Transmission). You can request them, but its not a quick process. Instead of that, try installing them yourself. Even without root, it shouldn’t be impossible, the only thing that may be annoying is you may not be able to setup reverse proxy so you’ll need to access those services with http://ip:port
Hey, glad to see another Asian person here :)
The sheet looks really useful, thank you for sharing it. I did the same research and ended up with the same conclusion which is why I went with hostingby.design, but after interacting with the people on discord it looks like the main guy is swamped with work and unable to really make new scripts and stuff.
Ultra.cc looks to have better app support and they aren’t using swizzin as their backend but app-box or something like that.
I tried distrobox without root which doesn’t work I also tried user install using apt, but unless the whole program is a single compiled binary, it isn’t working very well.
My other complaint is that I don’t know how their reverse proxy and wildcard certs work, so I can’t even put all these unofficial things (prowlarr, overseer) behind https.
Yeah, the reverse proxy thing is kind of annoying. It seems for the most part, you’d just need to access them through
http://IP:PORTwhich I understand you’d probably not want to do. Haven’t really found a way around that but Ultra.cc supports Overseerr nativelyHostingBy seems to have really good price, but I have heard that their support is lacking and if you want answers you’re better off asking in the discord for someone else to help you out.
Ultra recently introduced a Singapore option for some of their plans which I would definitely recommend if you’re located in Asia and you’re getting it as a media server. They also let you install pyenv (for Python versions), nodejs and golang so it’s easier for you to install your own apps. There are a lot of ways to compile your own apps, it just takes a bit of learning and time
Apparently it looks like, atleast on Ultra.cc, you can add your own reverse proxy configs to .apps/nginx/proxy.d and once you restart the nginx service if will proxy your requests. It’s just up to you to configure it properly although Support won’t help you with that. I imagine the other providers also have something similar although it may not be as straightforward
It’s not a real proper seedbox but I would suggest a subscription to Alldebrid.
You will get the ability to download directly from many hosters, and also this ability to use the Alldebrid seedbox to “convert” torrents to DDL links.
It’s a cheap subscription and it does everything I need to get movies, series and so on.
I have been using that for years and found it to be reliable.
You probably can get a free trial for a month if you want to see what the service does.
Is there a need for VPN/proxy with this?
You don’t need a VPN or proxy with Debrid services. They download and cache the torrents for you in their own servers, so you aren’t at risk of DMCA or the equivalent.
No, but I still use one anyway.
I guess it depends of where you live.
In my country you can have issues if you download copyrighted content over torrents. But you are pretty safe if you DDL. Which is very dumb but that’s the way it is.
Point is it depends on where you live and what the risks are for downloading stuff.
I have a RD subscription. The problem is it’s hard to use on an iOS device which is most of the stuff my fiancee uses unfortunately. The second problem is that it’s one IP per user, so each person who travels and uses their internet will need an account which quickly adds up.
I have RD setup on Android TV for my parents which has been stellar so far.
Ok.
I don’t know much about the differences between RD and AD but I don’t think AD is really enforcing the IP limitations. Or maybe only on streaming.
I have shared “debrided” links to a friend a few days ago and it didn’t seem to be an issue.
i recommend seedhost.eu
Can you share your experience installing apps and so on, on seedhost? Thank you :)
I click install. No setup really
Seedhost.eu supports these “addons” out of the box:
- SABNZBD
- rTorrent - ruTorrent
- RAPIDLEECH
- Resilio
- Transmission
- Autodl-irssi
- Deluge
- MakeTorrent
- Subsonic
- ZNC
- Sickbeard
- Sickrage
- Couchpotato
- Madsonic
- Pydio
- Fileshare
- Ratiocolor
- NZBGet
- Headphones
- Pyload
- Syncthing
- Jackett
- Sonarr
- Radarr
- Watcher
- Mylar
- Lounge
- Shout
- Medusa
- NZBHydra
- Airsonic
- Lidarr
- Prowlarr
- Bazarr
- Readarr
- Flaresolverr
- Qbittorrent
- Filebrowser
- Overseerr
- NZBHydra2
- autobrr
- Wireguard
- OpenVPN
and you have SSH access, so you can actually do a lot more stuff, but no root access.
I mainly used it for torrenting and the speed was always awesome. Great for seeding of course.
If you get a bigger one it might be worth running plex on it, but on smaller shared instances plex encoding performance can be bad, also depending on the size of your video files.
Overall i think it has a great cost/benefit.
I heard good things about put.io.
It looks good but seems to offer much less control, basically just torrent+file share. Can’t even host Plex/jellyfin which is a deal breaker for me.
Off topic question, I’m trying to learn about seedboxes: Do you have to configure your own VPN with your current seed box or is it not necessary?
It’s not necessary :) Since the torrenting is done on the seedbox and you’re accessing it sort of like google drive or something similar, there aren’t any issues. This is why you usually pick a seedbox in a different country.
On top of that, with some providers like seedbox.cc, they let you use your seedbox as a VPN with upto three users.
The whole point of using a seedbox is so that you don’t have to use a VPN (well, and speed). You probably shouldn’t use a seedbox with public trackers though. Some seedboxes will drop you from their service if they get a copyright request.
Some managed are already finished and ready to use.
My seedbox on hostingby.design has OpenVPN configured and I can just download the config file.
I currently have Pulsed Media seedbox, which has SSH access (no root) and docker, haven’t tried something like plex/jelyfin so I can’t tell how well it works.
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You should google the name if you want to try them, negative things pops up.
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Password authentication can’t be turned off for SSH.
Thank you :) I had come across PM in my search but their docs seemed a bit sparse.
So does it have rootless docker? Are you able to run docker containers like transmission or radar?
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