- This will be written for people looking for a new/first seedbox deal. I will write my thread in such a way that would have helped and saved myself a lot of time and research had I been able to read my own thread (time-traveling paradoxes aside...and all that).
- I am based in the USA, and while this might seem irrelevant, please note that while Kimsufi/OVH,.lu, etc., are the "best bang for your buck" (which is why most seedbox companies simply are resellers of these servers), you cannot order from them unless you are in certain European countries such as France or the U.K. So, I obviously cannot use them.
- I wanted to help out all the noobs looking for their first seedbox. I did my reading through the "seedbox review thread", it turned out to be a mixed bag, with many people reviewing dedicated servers reaching in the hundreds of dollars per month price, different people loving and hating the same companies, subjective ratings of 1-10 without any explanation (i.e. one person’s 5/10 rating can be another person’s 8/10 rating, but it’s meaningless without explanations.)
- I set a "hard" limit of $25 USD per month, reasonable I think for a new seedbox user. I don’t see many noobies wanting to shell out more than that, if even that much. I have tested out a few seedbox companies, and there were two that really stuck in my mind as quality service. As the title indicates, these two companies are Xirvik and Feralhosting.
- For some background, I personally am an advanced torrent and computer user of all sorts, I work in the IT industry; the gods however have frowned upon me and cursed me with a throttled ComCast connection, and no viable alternative in my area. So, I went the seedbox route. Dedicated was unnecessary, here were the criteria I was looking for (and that you should look for!) in a seedbox:
-Must allow unlimited torrents (important for bonus points, maximum potential speed, etc.)
-Must allow unmetered bandwidth (important for obvious reasons!)
-Must have no set-up fee (don’t bother with set-up fees unless you’re buying a server rack!)
-Must have a reasonable amount of HDD storage space, for my unlimited, unmetered torrents of course (important for keeping larger amounts of torrents seeding without having to clean up your files so often).
-Must be on at least a 100mbps line (anything less than this is an absolute joke if it’s called a seedbox)
-Must allow FTP access (to download files to my computer from the seedbox)
-Must be under $25 USD per month (I don’t mind it being, say, $25.99 or something due to paypal transaction fee etc., but you know what I mean.)
After much research, I came up with a total of three seedbox plans that fit my description. (I am providing links for reference so that people who read this thread can get a quicker view of the services and prices of the plans I reference...as I understand it, we are not allowed to "link to" sites in reviews, I believe this means clickable links and not plaintext URL links, watch what happens when you click them anyway, they link nowhere.)
-Xirvik Semidedicated servers: http://www.xirvik.com/semidedicated.html
-Feralhosting Speed Reloaded/Power Slot Plans: https://www.feralhosting.com/heron/plans
-Bytesized-Hosting Any Plan: http://www.bytesized-hosting.com
Unfortunately, the Bytesized-Hosting plans were out of stock (they seem quite popular and run out fast, also newer company so they don’t have much in stock right now...in fact, I signed up for their mailing list, got an e-mail slots were available, 1 day later they were all gone xD)...so these guys can’t get a review unfortunately, but I included them based on their feature list and price. Another option when it opens up more.
I guess I will follow the review format suggested by Dave in this forum, first, sorta(Follow the colors!)
Name: -Xirvik Semidedicated server slot
-Feralhosting Power Slot (This is the one I used, they also have a "speed reloaded slot that I have not tested)
Price:-Xirvik: Semidedicated Server: $24.95 USD /month
-Feralhosting Power Slot: UK £14.99 = $24.99 USD/month
Winner: Xirvik, by 4 cents I suppose!
Speed:
-Xirvik:100mbps line split between 3 users max, have personally maxed out at 12.5 MB up and down at the same time. This is a true 100mbps line. I find that the users sharing my server must be light users, as I can generally get 10MB/sec up and down simultaneously almost 24/7 if the torrents are the right ones.
-Feralhosting: 1gbps line, split between ten users. This means that you should (theoretically) have an average of a 100mbps line, but I have seen speeds such as the following:
I generally see the upload hovering around anywhere from 6-12MB/sec, spiking up to and continuously maintaining near 20MB/sec is common on very hot torrents. Xirvik definitely cannot go that high on the equally priced plans, and the MAX on the Xirvik is about where the Feral box is constantly at, on good torrents. I haven’t seen the Feralbox max out yet, the screenshot above is the fastest I’ve seen so far, but that finished really quickly and couldn’t max.
Winner: Feralhosting is definitely faster. It seems as if the speeds fluctuate a bit more, but I can’t really tell if that’s due to 10 people on a 1 gbps line hitting up torrents simultaneously, or if it’s just because Transmission remote (my preferred GUI with Feral) refreshes much faster than ruTorrent (Xirvik interface).
Support:
-Xirvik: This guy is available on MSN most of the time. Things are responded to promptly. There is a guarantee of a less than 12 hour setup time on the webpage, or your first week is free, and it was given to me in about 9 hours. Pretty fast, considering I placed the order on his webpage at about 4AM.
-Feralhosting: Ticketing system, tickets get updated pretty fast and fixed. Josh at Feral certainly knows what he is doing and seems like he would help you install something weird if you asked ^^. Webpage promises a <72 hour setup period, I got mine in about 60 hours, which was okay because I was prepared to wait. I still had my Xirvik (still do at the time of this review) to play with so the wait was okay.
Winner: Draw, if you want it super fast, go Xirvik. If you can hold your pants on for a max of 3 days, go Feral. Both can handle your fuckups though <3. If you’re a more advanced computer user like myself, Feral will be great for you.
GUI:
-Xirvik: rutorrent, wtorrent, rtGUI, HTTP web/internet download directory (slow web download).
-Feralhosting: rtorrent through putty, rutorrent, wtorrent, transmission web, transmission dot net remote GUI, probably deluge if you asked. Also has openVPN support, SFTP, public web directories, or private passworded, you have WinSCP access as well.
Winner: Feralhosting.
Speed of GUI:
-Xirvik: wtorrent seems to function the same in both boxes. RuTorrent seems faster in Xirvik’s though. Probably because there’s only 3 people sharing a server, instead of 10.
-Feralhosting: The loss of rutorrents speed is easily replaced by transmission dot net. Or transmission web interface, or wtorrent or hey rTorrent as well.
Winner: Feralhosting.
Package:
-Xirvik: 75 GB HDD space, 100 mbps line shared between 3 total users including you, http proxy, secure FTP, unlimited torrents active, unmetered traffic. Let’s you pick whether you want a server based in France (faster) or Germany (different privacy laws?) as well as the USA, but for whatever reason the USA servers are only available at a $5 per month premium.
-Feralhosting: 160 GB HDD space! 1 gbps split between 10 people. I imagine their speed slot would have less people being a 100mbps line, but the 1 gbps has been doing me nicely. FTP, ssh, VPN, html downloads, proxy, debian shell access, mysql, WinSCP...Unmetered traffic, unlimited active torrents.
Winner: Feralhosting.
Overall rating:
-Xirvik: 7.5/10. This guy sells pretty cheap server.lu boxes I believe. The semidedicated is where you’ll find your best deal. Xirvik is friendly and available most of the time to talk to live and fix or help you. Unlimited everything.
-Feralhosting: 8.5/10. Same price as Xirvik, unmetered OVH resellers, 1gbps line, unlimited everything. Shell access is awesome. Support is great. I messed up a config file that I transferred to the server, and accidentally set the RPC port and the incoming port on my transmission to the same port. I opened a ticket with details of only a cryptic error message. It was fixed 20 minutes later, Josh knows what he is doing.
Overall Winner: Feralhosting
Highly recommended by me so far. I’ve had a process or two hang, and there is a learning curve as I’m not a native Deb user, but Feral has amazing tutorial/FAQ’s on their website on how to kill and restart a process through putty, and much more. No disrespect to Xirvik, because there is definitely less resource share (only 3 people per server) and that’s a plus, but you get double the HDD space and a 1gbps line from Feral for the same price.
Or, you can even get the lower Feralhosting plan ("Speed" slot) for 10 GBP, around $16 USD per month. You get 100 GB HDD space, a 100 mbps line, and I don’t know how many per server on those as I don’t have one. So, for $9 less, you can have an extra 33% of HDD space when compared to Xirvik’s.
If you’re looking for a cheap, good personal seedbox, so far Feral is the best in my book.
If anybody's got anything to add to either of these side-by-side reviews here, just leave a comment and I'll try to work it into this post.
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Comparison of the best two $25 USD seedboxes: Xirvik vs. Feralhosting
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by MikeD
