Some noob questions about seedboxes (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by Tadpole7085@lemm.ee to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I apologize in advance because I'm sure these probably feel like some stupid and duplicate questions. However, my attempts to find answers to these online have been met with answers that are sparse, oftentimes old (8+ years), and conflicting. I am looking into getting a seedbox. I decided to go with Whatbox because they seem to consistently have the best reputation. But I have some questions regarding the safety of doing this.

Whatbox (and a few other seedbox companies) offer seedboxes in the US. How can they do that without being immediately shut down? Do they have some kind of restrictions that could cause problems with using a US-hosted seedbox? I've read that there is much faster torrent connection with EU-hosted boxes, but is that worth the tradeoff for direct download speeds? (According to Whatbox's network test, I'd be at 20 MB/s for USA and 10 MB/s for Netherlands.)
How safe is paying via your real payment details? Pretty much every seedbox seems to take crypto, which sounds a lot safer but tacks on processing fees and inconvenience. (Also I am morally opposed to crypto so I would prefer not to use it.) This is the question that really seemed to have conflicting answers when I looked.
How safe is connecting via your real IP, or should you still connect to the seedbox via VPN? I know that you won't get dinged by your ISP, I mean in case of something like the host being taken down and their records being looked through.

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[-] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 year ago

May also want to try !seedboxes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !seedboxes@reseed.it

Whatbox (and a few other seedbox companies) offer seedboxes in the US. How can they do that without being immediately shut down? Do they have some kind of restrictions that could cause problems with using a US-hosted seedbox?

AFAIK they do honor DMCA removal requests so if you happen to load a public torrent there & receive a notice Whatbox staff will ask you to delete that data. You could contact their support on that if you're not sure on their procedure.

How safe is paying via your real payment details?

I've only used crypto for those things. But presumably if you find a pre-paid credit card they accept you could buy it with cash & then pay the seedbox provider with that.

How safe is connecting via your real IP

The seedbox service itself is essentially a VPN so you either trust it, or you don't. You could just as well ask how safe is it to connect to your VPN, or if you need to use another VPN to connect to your VPN :P

One thing to keep in mind is that seedbox services probably do log more data than the typical no-log VPN.

[-] akwd169 1 points 1 year ago

Those two communities have 3 subs total, and two of them are me (just subbed now)

[-] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

That's not the total subscriber count. Sounds like you're viewing the subscriber count from your specific instance at lemmy.sdf.org - The 3 subs you mention are subs from users at lemmy.sdf.org specifically.

To see the total subscriber count you'd have to view the communities home instance directly e.g.