I decided to ditch the cable connection and drive my internet through my cellphone. It sort of works, but it makes me a piece of shit because I can't seed (slow uplink, minimal storage, battery drain).

Enter seedboxes, where I can ul a little better and store a little more.

Most of the guides are written by seedboxes themselves so I thought I'd turn to the community for the nitty-gritty. Questions:

1. How do I protect my anonymity from the seedbox company if I'm paying them?
2. Do seedboxes protect their own anonymity or do I need to also hook up a VPN to the seedbox?
3. Recommendations for cheap seedboxes with minimal storage? I'm really only an occassional d/l'er and already have quite a backlog, so I doubt I'd be moving more than 40gigs/month. \

Thanks!

*The dedicated seedbox forum is pretty darn dead.

A lot of seedbox providers accept crypto if you want to be anonymous.

When you transfer data between the seedbox and your computer, you usually use SFTP or FTPS. Those are both encrypted, so nobody can see what you are transferring.

I've been using Ultra.cc, which is pretty cheap, but they did raise their prices recently. If you only occasionally download stuff, you may be better off with usenet and a block account.

Hi! You can often pay with crypto, and this is usually well enough for anonymity. I’d be concerned paying with a credit card, but many do that.

I use a VPN even with a seedbox, especially when connecting to them to retrieve the files, but for their own anonymity, they don’t care. They’re usually in jurisdictions where it’s harder and not worth it for companies to try to sue them.

I use seedit4me, but I haven’t tried any other. I’m pretty satisfied with them for the past 3 or 4 years. You can look at their different offerings and get something within your budget. I felt like there’s a bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but if you already know the *arr stack, you’ll be well ahead of me when I started!

I hope my answers helped a little. The others’ answers will likely have more information.

Have fun!

With sftp/ftps, it’s true that they don’t know what you’re copying, but the metadata contains the ip address and the file size, so if someone’s specifically interested in trying to get you, then it’s easy for them to guess what you’re doing. That’s why we’re all torrenting Linux ISOs and AI models.

But that’s just my take on it, most don’t use a vpn when using seedboxes.

https://ultra.cc/

Usenet is still kicking around? Wow! So if a place says it has 10 year retention, that means it has every usenet post for 10 years? That's gotta be an enormous frickin' library! And it might help me build my music library, which is pretty sparse since I can't soulseek through a mobile connection (ports)....

My only real concern is software availability/usability on Android. I remember downloading from Usenet on desktop back in the day and it was very fussy.

I think this might be the way to go. Thanks for thinking outside the seedbox!

Yes, it's still around. The retention is how long they keep the posts. Some providers will have lower retention for binaries than text, so check the fine print. I looked for android clients and found Usenet Panda. It looks like it supports everything needed to find and download binaries.