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Seedbox recommendations (thinking of switching)

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 :)

cow ,
@cow@lemmy.world avatar

I selfhost my own seedbox at home. I have a vm on my server which is always connected to a vpn that runs qbittorrent-nox.

Reliant1087 OP ,

I have my own local set up with qbitorrent, transmission, deluge, cross seed, all the arrs and the whole lot :) I use it to watch things at home.

This seedbox is for sharing with my family who lives in different parts of the world. With my internet, it isn’t feasible to share stuff from my home.

sturmblast ,

Started using swizzin.ltd recently, very happy with it.

Reliant1087 OP ,

Looks like their offering is pretty similar. I think the hbd people are collaborating with swizzin devs because they share same scripts etc.

sturmblast ,

Could be, I wouldn’t blame them. It works great.

Marafon ,

I’ve been using whatbox.ca for 5 or 6 years now and I recommend them. I haven’t set up plex or jellyfin but my understanding is that it is possible.

Reliant1087 OP ,

Thank you :) I’ve heard generally good things about them. The reason I didn’t pick them initially was because the 15$ plan is 2/5TB which is a bit less than the options I mentioned.

How is the app selection? Are you able to use SSH keys?

Marafon ,

Their faq says they have one click installation for the following: rTorrent Deluge Transmission Plex Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr Jackett Syncthing Jellyfin qBittorrent

I’m not actually sure what an SSH key is but you can find just about anything you could want to know here:

whatbox.ca/wiki

The reason I recommend them is because their customer support has been top tier in all of my interactions with them.

Reliant1087 OP ,

The list is pretty similar to hbd. Hbd doesn’t have transmission and syncthing, and prowlarr is semi-official but instead they have Medusa, autobrr, filebrowser and resiliosync.

Will check out the wiki :) If you have ssh enabled in your box, I would suggest looking up SSH keys. I have some public stuff I run for my work and I get at least a hundred brute force attacks on port 22 when I use a password.

How is there customer support infrastructure? With hbd I can raise tickets or talk on discord where they answer pretty fast.

Marafon ,

I will do some research on SSH keys as you suggest, thanks for the heads up.

I just went to look at the support tab and I didn’t see any discord info but they have a ticket system that still has all 5 tickets I’ve ever submitted all being 4-8 years old. Didn’t even realize I had had it that long lol. Its obviously been a while but I remember a pretty quick response each time I needed them.

Reliant1087 OP ,

That’s amazing :) I am definitely going to try them if I am sticking around.

The prompt for me to switch was the fact that Netflix, Hulu and prime increasing their prices which made many members of my family stop using them. If they can adapt to Plex/jellyfin, then I’ll probably keep it around and maybe even upgrade.

speq ,

I heard good things about put.io.

Reliant1087 OP ,

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.

luckyboy ,
@luckyboy@lemmynsfw.com avatar

i recommend seedhost.eu

Reliant1087 OP ,

Can you share your experience installing apps and so on, on seedhost? Thank you :)

undefined ,

I click install. No setup really

luckyboy ,
@luckyboy@lemmynsfw.com avatar

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.

Reliant1087 OP ,

Thank you :) This is quite helpful. With SSH but without root, are you able to install many things?

I’ve found Plex to be okay on the shared one because it’s hardly being used most of the time, at least on hbd.

I’m really tempted to try out seedhost for a month :)

luckyboy ,
@luckyboy@lemmynsfw.com avatar

yeah i mean you can download/upload binary files to the seefbox and run them

Reliant1087 OP ,

Sure, but you need the dependencies and libraries, and a way to manage them. There are few things that are just a standalone file.

luckyboy ,
@luckyboy@lemmynsfw.com avatar

yes if you need any non standard libs it wont work. but stand-alone binary files can be executed

Reliant1087 OP ,

I was sad when I couldn’t get ranger to work. I’m fine with just having vi and screen instead of vim and tmux, but I truly miss ranger.

luckyboy ,
@luckyboy@lemmynsfw.com avatar

i used gokcehan/lf and if i remember correctly it worked (as a compiled stand-alone binary).

Also mounting the seedbox with sshfs is super useful for me.

Reliant1087 OP ,

This is awesome :) I’m going to try this tomorrow.

whiskers ,

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?

Reliant1087 OP ,

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.

Appoxo ,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

Reliant1087 OP ,

Hey, I’m currently on hbd too, curious to know how to find the openvpn config. So far I’ve only found wireguard.

Appoxo ,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I was grandfathered in from seedbox.io days.

In your case I’d recommend asking support if they could configure it for you. But tbh wireguard is fine as well.

Reliant1087 OP ,

That’s really cool :) Thank you. I will probably stick with wireguard.

undefined ,

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.

axzxc1236 ,

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.

  • You should google the name if you want to try them, negative things pops up.
  • Password authentication can’t be turned off for SSH.
Reliant1087 OP ,

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?

Tetsuo ,

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.

lemming007 ,

Is there a need for VPN/proxy with this?

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

No, but I still use one anyway.

Tetsuo ,

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.

lemming007 ,

Because they can’t see what you’re downloading via direct download especially if it’s over HTTPS. On the other hand, it’s trivial to see everyone’s IP if they download the same torrent you are, then they just send letters to ISPs owning those IPs who then pass it on to you.

Reliant1087 OP ,

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.

Reliant1087 OP ,

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.

Tetsuo ,

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.

Reliant1087 OP ,

Let me check out the ToS of AD. Thanks for the heads up. On RD if I log into my partner’s account who lives in a different place, she gets logged out and vice versa.

yoichi ,

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 interestedIgnore 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 ip:port

Reliant1087 OP ,

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.

yoichi ,

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:PORT which I understand you’d probably not want to do. Haven’t really found a way around that but Ultra.cc supports Overseerr natively

HostingBy 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

yoichi ,

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

Reliant1087 OP ,

Hey, you’ve been really helpful, so thank you :) The reason I didn’t go with Singapore is because my partner currently lives in the US and this is mostly for her, I have my own homelab setup that I haven’t exposed to the internet.

I’ll checkout if I can write my own nginx files on hostinby as well based on what you said :D

Ultra looks to have the most apps supported out of the box, so I might switch to them if I can’t iron out stuff on hbd. I saw that hbd has a script for homebrew of all things. Are you familiar with using brew to install stuff on Linux?

yoichi ,

I’ve never used homebrew so I’m not sure. Looking at their discord, it’s also not supported by them so I don’t even know how you’d go about it tbh. Try it out and see if you can figure it out, maybe it’s just a simple path issue

Reliant1087 OP ,

Yeah. I got pipx and npx working so, simple things should be fine. I really wish distrobox would work but it hasn’t so far.

yoichi ,

This is the first I’m hearing of distrobox. Guessing you need root priveleges for that?

Reliant1087 OP ,

Not really, you can use rootless docker or podman but the seedbox owners need to add you to the correct groups and they’re not willing to do that.

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