Today we added new tools to your dashboard to give you more power over your server.

A few weeks ago we discovered a problem in the reboot system and had to temporarily remove it. That has been fixed now along with a new safer ’soft reboot’. You can also now hard reboot the system (power cycle the server).

Before resorting to those methods though, we wanted to create the ability to check the status on other systems, like the web server, ftp server and the rTorrent client. These have been added as well as the ability to restart these services individually.

To find these new tools, check out the “maintenance” tab in your dashboard.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think.

// SeedboxHosting.com Team //

We are now testing ruTorrent, version 3.1, which is packed with new features. So far we love it and want to make it available for anyone else who wants to help us test it on our seedboxes.

All SeedboxHosting.com seedboxes come with separate data partitions where all your files live. This means you can easily go to your dashboard and install version 3.1 or revert back to the stable 2.8 version without destroying your files.

We have also made this new seedbox installation available with SSL for secure web based access.

After a bit more beta testing with early adopters, we will make this the default installation for all new seedboxes.

Let us know how you like it.

// Seedbox Hosting Team //

At 8:30pm Friday night, the power supply in our main web application server failed and the server went down. (Yes, it had only one Hey, it was our first server purchase years ago and has had an uptime of more than 12 months! However, it was silly not to have any more power supplies on hand. Of course, no customer seedboxes went down or were affected by this, but it did result in downtime for the front end of seedboxhosting.com. We had to figure out another way to get the server online – and it would be well into Saturday before this happened.

This has resulted in the decision to escalate something we have been planning to do for some time. We have begun to move critical services (Dashboard, Accounting, Monitoring, DNS) off of single servers and into distributed cloud environments.

Being mostly a Ruby shop, we chose Engine Yard to help us with this – and they have been great so far. Their automation, simple deployment and ability to clone production environments into staging areas for testing is beautiful. We are very excited about the new possibilities of working with well tested and standardized Ruby on Rails stacks.

All this means our team can stop focusing on hardware for critical services and on providing a better seedbox experience for us all.

// Seedbox Hosting Team //

Like any company experiencing dramatic growth, SeedboxHosting.com has recently been through its ups and downs.

Because it is important to us that we do not to oversell servers, we have been constantly buying new servers to keep up with demand. This has been working well and everyone loves the service.

However, when we suddenly lost two customer service employees, we were unprepared for the result.

It takes a lot of time to train new people and customer service quickly became unmanageable. People had questions and did not get responses. We simply could not keep up due to the huge number of new customers.

Of course all our customers are protected by our iron clad money-back gaurantee. We have given back thousands of dollars (and euros) recently to make up for our temporary loss of customer service. This greatly helps to patch things up with people who have come to expect a high level of quality customer support. However, obviously it is not a solution.

Today, we are very happy to report that not only are we back on track, we have taken huge steps to prevent this again in the future.

Our customer service department is working very well now and we appreciate the hard work of everyone involved in making this happen.

We have also hired a couple more developers that are building innovative new tools to make the self-service experience here easy and more powerful.

A brand new dashboard enables users to see all their seedboxes at once and switch between them in tabs. Users can rebuild their own seedbox from the ground up, choose the bittorrent client, and if their data and personal files should be saved.

We are developing plugins for ruTorrent as well as browser extensions to make using a seedbox easier. We will be blogging about many of these new changes and features in the coming days.

We here at SeedboxHosting.com want to thank our many loyal customers who have stuck with us through this difficult few weeks and look forward to continuing to provide an awesome seedbox experience.

// SeedboxHosting.com Team //

For all of those uTorrent lovers out there, we are now offering ruTorrent. ruTorrent is a visual replica of the famous uTorrent client, but has the power of rTorrent under the hood. Packed full of features, including the ability to create torrents in the webUI, ruTorrent has become our personal favorite. Its light weight design means more resources for your torrents and a snappy interface. Plus, you get to enjoy the great speeds that rTorrent boasts!

For all of our new customers, ruTorrent is now our default installation. You will be able to use this great client as soon as you sign up.

By switching to ruTorrent, existing customers will still enjoy frequent updates, auto RSS downloads, and labeling that uTorrent offered. We are very excited to have this installation available and hope that you will give it try!

To get your seedbox installed now, login into our help desk and let us know you would like to switch. We will be glad to help you out.

Torrentflux-b4rt is one of the interfaces we offer as an option on our seedboxes. If you have multiple users sharing your Torrentflux seedbox, you should be aware of a recently discovered bug that could allow one user to view the torrent of another user.

The good news for users of SeedboxHosting.com is that if you have Torrentflux-b4rt installed on your seedbox, this problem has already been fixed – you don’t have to do anything. We worked quickly to update huge numbers of seedboxes on our network so that you can continue to seed, worry free.

If you don’t have a Torrentflux seedbox with us you should read about the problem and the fix here: http://tf-b4rt.berlios.de/forum/index.php/topic,2019.0.html.

Of course, if you don’t want to fix it yourself, you can always get one of our safe and secure seedboxes.

torrentflux-b4rt running on a Linux server has been the standard seedbox from the beginning. We have been offering this for over two years and will continue to do so. It has by far the most options and tools. But these days, there are many choices when deciding what to run on your seedbox. Choices are good.

rTorrent is known for high performance while using a small amount of resources. The code is c++ instead of a scripting language and differentiates itself from other implementations by transferring directly from file pages to the network stack. It is claimed to be able to seed 3 times faster than the official client.

wTorrent is a good web-based front end to rTorrent. We now provide this as the default client on some of our seedboxes.

uTorrent, everyones favorite windows bittorrent client, also does high performance seeding and was “written with efficiency in mind”. We now make not only the webUI available but the actual windows program served up over NX. You can download the free NX Client and access the uTorrent windows GUI just like you were running it on your local windows machine.

When it comes to your seedbox, you should be running whatever you like. We are here to help make that happen. So, what kind of seedbox do you want? It’s your choice.

Transmission 1.71 is now available. We recompiled it for Torrentflux-b4rt and made it available on our seedboxes. Upgrade using the “upgrade_transmission” button in your control panel.

Enjoy!

// SeedboxHosting Team //

Just a quick note to let you know that we recently made a newer Transmission available. You can now upgrade your seedbox to version 1.61 by clicking the “upgrade_transmission” button.

Let us know if you have any questions or need any help by visiting our help desk.

// SeedboxHosting Team //

We just got another round of our LW Pro servers.

The LW Pro is not only our most powerful seedbox with a Gig of ram and a fully dedicated 1TB hard disk, but it has new features that make it easy to share the cost with friends and family.

• Full superadmin access with all features
• Easily create private accounts for friends and family
• A private FTP account is automatically created for each new user
• Set quota limits on how much disk space each user can use
• Set quota limits on how many torrents each user can start

The server costs €97 per month which is easily split between 4 or 5 people. You can get one of these servers here.