There are a few key decisions that will help you make the right choice when selecting your seedbox. Here the the main ones.
Storage
Obviously the more storage space you have the more you can have stored on your server. This also means you can have more torrents seeding at anyone time, which is key if you are trying to build up a ratio on a private torrent network. It also means you don’t have to download your files as often to make space for new files. I think around 60 gig is a good starting point. If you are buying a seedbox to help boost the speed of a legal torrent you are distributing…i.e. a Linux distribution or legal movie, and you basically just want to have the file seeding 24/7 at full speed then storage may not be important. However, most users will want plenty of storage.
Speed
The speed of the connections is obviosuly very important. The faster the better. There are a few factors that will affect speed and a few places in the process where speed will be key. The first factor is the line speed of the seedbox server. Is it on a 100mbit connection or a 1Gbit connection? Secondly, is how many other users are sharing that connection with you. Having a 100mbit connection to yourself is still going to be faster than sharing a 1Gbit connection with 15 or 20 other users. As the speed of seedboxes tends to be very fast when compared with your home connection, this may not be a huge deal. Even a fairly slow seedbox connection can download a 2 gig movie back to your box in a few minutes, depending on how well the torrent is seeded by other users. Where speed will be very important for you is the speed at which you can download files via FTP back to your home computer. Ideally you want to be maxing out your home connection here. If you use a multi segment downloading ftp client like cuteftp you should be able to easily max out your cable or dsl connection. If you are not finding this, then maybe you don’t have the right provider. This speed will be effected by other users on your box, and how far away the seedbox is from your home location…i.e. if the seedbox is hosted on the other side of the world it may be a little slower. The specs of the server and how much the server is being hammered will also affect this speed.If the server is low of RAM, and has a slower CPU, and you are sharing the server with 10+ users, things are going to be slower, and your torrent interface is going to be less stable.
Less Users
As mentioned above, if you are sharing a server with a lot of users this is going to affect your experience. Always look for a provider who openly shares information about how many users are on each seedbox. Some providers also have polices about how they manage resources on servers, and most will have terms of fair use polices. It’s worth reading through these before signing up.
Interface
ruTorrent is the most common seedbox torrent interface, mostly because it has very low resource use which puts less strain on the server. Deluge and Torrent flux tend to be a little more resource intensive, meaning providers will charge you more to use them, however, they are also more aggressive when downloading files, so as long as the seedbox isn’t over subscribed, deluge should get your files downloaded faster, and hunt out users to seed to more aggressively. Transmission is another interface, which like rutorrent has a fairly low server footprint, however, users tend to find the interface a little less user friendly, which is why it is less popular.
Cost
Cost is obviously a major consideration for most people. Balancing the results of all the above considerations, and then finding the cheapest option based on these is the best way to go. Cheap isn’t always going to cut it. But balance between price, storage, speed, users, and which interface you want to use should help you find a great seedbox.