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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 07 2018, @07:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the ceding-seeding dept.

TorrentFreak reports on the closure of SeedStuff, a once popular "seedbox". Seedboxes are remote servers available for rent that can download and upload using BitTorrent, and store files for users to download anonymously later:

"The private trackers gamified seeding and rewarded their best members, this is what really paved the way for seedboxes. The users felt a need to compete and often did not have access to the means to do so, but could contract these machines out to help them succeed. The demand for seedboxes started in about 2010, which I think you will see coincided with a huge spike of private tracker activity."

SeedStuff says its initial aim was to improve user experience by not following the decision by many existing providers to "stuff as many users as possible" into each server. Restricting each unit to a maximum of four users and accepting just a small profit on each, the service grew while gaining support from customers.

"At our peak, we serviced over 4000 customers per month. Our total email database was well over 10,000 customer accounts. We did not monitor bandwidth or user activities as we felt this to be intrusive. We only dealt with server providers who offered unlimited bandwidth so that we were able to allow for the best user experience without limits," the company explains.

But after several years of growth, SeedStuff noticed a change. In addition to suffering a painful database crash caused by a host and a failed backup regime, in 2015 the company observed a shift in user patterns. "We noticed around this time that streaming services had started to become mainstream in almost every home and people were simply not using our services anymore. The main cancellation reason for the last three years has been 'Not needed anymore'," SeedStuff notes.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @08:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @08:29AM (#648926)

    Once the transition from personal computers to toys is complete, and torrenting will be considered an act of terrorism (wait it already is), you will miss your seedbox a lot.

    Me? I have enough free as in freedom stuff to go by. Pirating is still abiding to the system. I either "buy" and download, or ignore altogether.

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