Plan
Argon
200GB Raid 0 SSD
20 Gbps Unlimited Traffic
£20 /month
Introduction:
Feralhosting is first recommended to me when I was still new to the whole Seedbox idea a few years ago. It is certainly a big name in the Seedbox industry but is not something you can find on the first page of Google search result. I was sceptical at first, but after using it for a month, I fall in love with it. Now that I have much more experience with seedbox, Feral still has a special space in my heart.
My first Feral Box
I am in search of a cheap box with a huge upload capacity lately. And Feral in my eyes is the best box in this category,
(Other seedboxes I tested have major problems.
Chmuranet: 62 Euros is a good deal for what they offer but it ain't cheap
Bytesized Hosting Capsule: They enabled Capsule bandwidth limitations recently.
Dediseedbox: The performance is subpar)
Obviously, I am going to try other boxes and update you guys in the future. But let's see what Feral is capable of for now.
Basics:
Delivery time is perfect. I get the box minutes after ordering it. This is what you get when you fully automate everything. The box comes with nothing preinstalled, and the only thing I get is an SSH login. I install rTorrent & ruTorrent through their pannel and qBittorrent. The Deluge offered by Feral is largely outdated and resulted in inferior performance. They have never changed it for a long time, so I don't even bother installing it. I have also installed autodl-irssi using the guide in the wiki, which is straight forward and easy.
For those who haven't noticed, Feral SSH doesn't come with root, which means a lot of tunning that I can do on my Chmuranet box is not possible here. The only tunning that I did is changing some libtorrent parameters. And if you are interested in Feral libtorrent tunning, I can tell you now. It is total garbage. They used default values which are designed to, I don't know, run on raspberry pie? For things that I can't change, like the Kernel parameters, it is largely okay. I mean, at least they enable BBR, so I would give them a pass here.
Load:
Resouces sharing is a huge concern for a lot of people, and that includes me. At the time of writing this post, the machine is shared by 47 users, and 7 shared the same disk pool with me. The total amount of users is, I think, lower than their normal (I would expect > 70), and the number of people sharing the disk pool is about right for this price range. CPU is Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz with 24 Cores in total. Load average is around 40. They have 252GB of RAM with 90.2GB committed. https://i.imgur.com/Mdz1Jc0.png
Each disk pool consists of 2 x Samsung SSD 845D RAID 0 (SATA 6 Gb/s drive. More about this drive). I have no idea how is this going to achieve the advertised 40 Gbit/s I/O bandwidth, maybe with some voodoo magic? Despite being SSD, you can see some disks are really struggling with the amount of reading and writing going on. Disk utilization of some disks is 100% all the time, and the overall I/O wait is not pretty. It is, however, still in usable range in my point of view. https://i.imgur.com/4PcMTwM.png
The machine has 2x10Gbps NICs. They are indeed busy but not to the extent that it would majorly handicap your upload speed. There is still headroom that you can capitalize. https://i.imgur.com/HXR6u20.png https://i.imgur.com/AgQn3K3.png
Performance:
The only thing that matters is how well it performs, right? I start loading qBittorrent with torrents, and I soon realize I am not connecting to any seeders. Turn out the box's IP is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and there is no way I am going to connect to any of the Chinese seeders and peers. What a huge bummer. Not every machine of Feral is blocked, Hippolytus, for example, is not blocked for now. It is a major concern if you are planning to use the box on Chinese trackers but otherwise shouldn't matter. I decided to load the box with a few western trackers and see how it will go.
So far, the box has been running for ~ 7 days (170Hrs as reported by htop) and the total upload as reported by qBittorrent is 74.499TiB. This translate to 10.5TiB per day and 315TiB per month (30 Days). The peak speed I observed is around 600MB/s, and the more sustainable speed at racing is about 200MB/s to 400MB/s.
https://i.imgur.com/CeRkn4f.png
Due to the lack of drive space, I have to hit & run in almost every torrent. This hurts my overall average seedtime significantly and ratio as well. This is possibly the biggest drawback of this seedbox.
Conclusion:
A shared seedbox with poor FUP likes Feral is never going to provide a very stable experience. The addition of a single neighbour can cause a day and night in performance. Nonetheless, it is to me a good and inexpensive box, and I am content with what I get considering I am only paying £20. Ask me if you have any questions.
Other:
First of all, let me do an update on my Chmuranet box. Basically, I decided to cancel the box on the due day. They don't kick me out or anything, but I decided if they are not totally happy with my usage, I am happy to go. They are super chill about this, and yea we are still cool.
One thing that I forgot to mention in the original post is their support. wBuddha is not your typical salesman, so I can see people getting worried. I reach out to them twice (both times is because of my fault. I mean, that's what you get when you give root access to an incompetent user). The first time they fix the issue in like 5mins? The second time I left a message in their IRC during their off-hour and they responded to me within a few hours of time. Super effective support.
And for future posts. I think I will talk about Dedicated seedboxes like Hetzer or Walkerserver boxes. I am also planning to test seedboxco.net and seedboxes.cc. I might make a post talking about them as well if they are good.
