Thread: Expressions of Interest - Share a 1Gbit Dedi Seedbox!

Ok guys. I promised to keep you posted and last night I got my answers from josh. so here they are:

1. There is only 1 IP/server and we can't get more even if we pay. All shared plans have the same IP for a server and the dedis also come with 1 IP.

2. The discount would be from 110AUD to 105AUD for 2 servers. The minimum period for a subscription is 6 months if we want no setup costs or 3 monts with 150AUD setup costs/server. That would be 210AUD each upfront for the 6 months comparted to 105+50AUD each for the 3 months. 6 months in this conditions seems like a no-bainer for me.

3. There are no traffic limits and here I will quote him" there is no traffic limit as such but don't expect amazing performance for such a cheap price". Upon asking for more details he told me that his estimates here(check the notes) still apply. Those are really high estimates for a shared box and maybe they are just for marketing? 6 users on a Gbit line can't all get 60MB/s averages...

4. I also asked about setup costs if you want to use his services and he offered to install torrent clients for 20AUD/server one time. That's if you don't want MikeD who kindly offered to do it for us.


After chatting with MikeD a little we agreed that for such a long period(6months) we have to do a little more research about his services...especially after his performance reply. Setting up the server with 1 IP is possible but we have to let the trackers know in advance if we want to keep out of troubles...that's what MikeD said ;)


If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know and I will answer or forward them to josh. You can also contact him directly(he provided an email on custom's welcome page) if you want to ask more specific questions. He usually replys fast.

It would be nice to know who is still interested in the 6 months subscription(or 3 months+costs) under the new circumstances. This way we can plan our next cource of action better.

Thanks Andi, MikeD & PEBKAC for your posts.

Just to shake things up again...

I've received a very interesting PM from PEBKAC which shows Thelen from Custom's answer to the question: How do you get around the 1TB cap on the DigiCibe Plans. I won't post it here without PEBKAC's permission, but the gist is that the cap is in the Terms Of Service just to cover them should anyone really go to town, such as the problems OVH had at one stage. Apparently they (Custom) don't anticipate any problems provided user don't start downloading 15GBs a week. Now I'm sure he didn't mean that as an exact figure, but just that the normal 1TB-3TB per week per user should be fine and in their testing has been fine.

So, this brings me to suggest that we go direct to DigiCube. I can't see any advantage going with Custom other than they have good customer support. We can't get a shorter contract with Custom, so no advantage there and the cost, although still attractive, is much higher than if we went direct. As we have MikeD onboard, we don't need Custom for setup reasons.

Custom per box AUD105 (with 2 box discount) = approx USD 93 (Googles rate today) /3 = USD 31ea

DigiCube "Digi Large" (configured same as custom Dedi4) Eur 50 per box = approx USD 68 /3 = USD 22.66ea

Going DigiCube direct is 27% cheaper

Regarding IPs, I agree it would be best to have separate IPs, that's been our aim all along. However, I wonder how much of an issue it really is. Currently I'm on 2 seedboxes one is shared with 10 other users, the other probably around the same. Chances are I'm a member of quite a few of the same trackers as these users. Still, informing trackers does seem a good precaution, just thought I bring this point up.

Regarding clients, seeing as MikeD says it's no big deal to have different clients, but it would be nice to have a Headless server with all rtorrent. I'll just say that I like rtorrent, so would be happy with an all rtorrent set-up, but acknowledge that wouldn't suit everyone. If it helps save resources a bit, I'll go rtorrent no matter what. Another idea would be to have one box rtorrent and the other utorrent...

Anyway, I guess the first thing to do is decide on the provider, I had a look at both OVH (direct) and Server.lu today. Both are great of course, both have similar but much more publicly announced (it's on the sales page) transfer caps, both are probably "higher quality" and both are more expensive.

With Digi being 22 USD a month I think there's not much to loose, even if the performance turns out to be not as great as we would like, at that price It's around the same cost as either of my current shared (10 user, approx 100GB HDD) boxes.

Sorry, I'm labouring that a bit. The Digi option is cheap!

Cheers,
Frizz

PS we could even upgrade the processor of the Digi Large a bit, or add another HHD so each user gets their own 500GB drive and still be ahead cost wise (each of those options is an extra 5euro)

Yes i agree Frzz. I dont see any point in going with Custom if there Digicube re-sellers. I seriously can set this up for all users no matter what they want. It usually takes me 5-10 minutes setup time for 1 user and thats a complete setup. Again, if u or anyone wants to learn or watch me do it, then thats not a problem. I could setup VNC and we could both log in and anyone could watch. I think the prices u posted above is pretty good for the server we are getting and i dont have a problem with going with Digicube. I guess lets see what happens here.

im good with going with digicube.

This was my PM to MikeD and Frizz, but after reading the thread and seeing you guys are on board with digicube ideea I can go ahead and post it here. Let me know what do you think about it.

"I've done 1.75 TB traffic sience I got my box from custom(9/2/2010) , but I suspect other are doing alot more, because I was away most of the time and never really loaded it with torrents. If what PEBAK said is true and custom based his entire business knowing/assuming they won't get caught than let's do it and order from digicube directly. we can do it the smart way though....we are 5 or 6 and probably more if we count PEBAK friend(s). We can order it for 3 months and all of us(the more the better) share the costs. Than we can pull a decent(huge?) amount of traffic in the first weeks or so and if we don't get in trouble we can start to split and go with the original plan. 3 users can remain on that box , and the for the rest order another 1 or 2 servers so that we can be 2-3/box. We can do the math and split the contributions to be equal for all when all the servers are bought.At digicube we can get 8GB ram, 2x500GB hdd and their default settings for the large gbit box with 50E total....like 30% discount compared to customseedbox.


What do you guys think? Is it worth to split the 150E initial cost and if we like the box after a probation period start ordering more servers? I know we will be 5+ users on the box the first days/weeks and the torrenting experience will suffer, but that's not the point. We just want to see the overall performance(hope you can help us with that Mike) and keep individual contribution to a minimum in case they do enforce their terms and conditions on us. If that's not the case we can proceed and get all the servers we need to acustom the initial userbase. We minimize the risks this way!

If you like this ideea I will make a post in the thread to let the rest of the guys know about it.

Andi out! "

I would be good with that, as long as the number of users on the box doesn't get too high. also will the processor be the stock processor or a upgraded one?

@jb123: It will be high for a shorter period and not the whole 3 months. But I guess 5-8 users it's enough to keep the costs/risk low and still get 1GB ram+ and 120GB+ hdd to make it a decent torrenting experience for that period.

MikeD can you tell us if there is any advantage(I know there are, but to what degree? ) in going with diffrent settings(processor wise and maybe other things). As Frizz said we can make the box better than a dedi4 for the same amount of money or even less and if there are clear advantages please let us know.

Originally Posted by andi

MikeD can you tell us if there is any advantage(I know there are, but to what degree? ) in going with diffrent settings(processor wise and maybe other things). As Frizz said we can make the box better than a dedi4 for the same amount of money or even less and if there are clear advantages please let us know.

Well there really is no way to make the box better. We could maybe tweak it a little bit to squeeze more performance, but Linux doesnt need to be tweaked really. Depending on what Distro we go with they're usually all stable & good to work with right out of the box. What u will see is what u get with Linux. Its the best OS in any situation like this and will perform/handle well under stress, unlike Windoze. I could still tweak it a little so we get better performance, but its going to be nothing we will notcie.

The specs & how many users we setup are the key here. This is what will dictate our speed and performance. The specs of the server we are getting are great and the processor is powerful. We could easily put at least 8 users on this server and everyone will be satisfied. However, I would like to see 6, but we could do 8 if we had to.

Since we are going to go with the new suggestion and only get 1 server, then this is what i suggest. I suggest setting up a headless server running all rtorrent + rutorrent with SSH access to each user. These will be the best settings period and will give us a clear advantage then running uTorrent + wine. Running wine + utorrent wouldnt be bad, but we could get more out of an rtorrent server then utorrent server. With utorrent we would obviously need wine, vnc, window manager or gui, etc.. This is all extra resources the server will eat up, that if we ran all rtorrent we wouldnt need any of that. So in the long run we not only would be saving HDD space, but ram, cpu and so on. The more we can save on all that equals the more speed and performance we will get for each user. Do u see what i mean here? To run utorrent u need X & a GUI, well u dont necessarliy need X or a GUI, but i would highly suggest it, cause i seen nothing but bad experiences when not running it. With rtorernt we dont need anything, but rtorrent.

Anyway, sorry for such a long post and i will go with whatever u guys want. It doesnt matter to me really, but what i posted above is just the truth about this. The bottom line is that will bring the best advantage and settings wise for torrenting. Other then that i would like to see what u guys think.

I think andi might have been asking if the processor should be upgraded from the stock one.

edit: just reread your post and you did address the processor.