SeedCafe
Editor's Review
Seedcafe was one of the first seedboxes I tried, I initially signed up to package 1 for $15 a month which restricted the max torrents to 6. This was a problem as I came to find out later. In order to seed to full capacity you need to have many different seeds active, ideally over 15. So you can build your ratio as high as possible.
With just 6 torrents there were long periods where I was not seeding anything. I contacted admins about the inactive torrents several times, the admins upgraded my account for free to package 2 which allowed unlimited torrents. Which allowed me to add as many torrents as I wanted, thereby maximising my upload speed.
Summary of Seedcafe
Max download speed: 1.9MB/s (burst at 4MB/s)*
Max upload speed: 1.7MB/s (burst at 4MB/s)*
*Burst is the occasional periods when the max speed, goes beyond the stable max speed for a couple of minutes or seconds (usually the latter)
Screenshot of typical use
A snaptshot of typical use with Seedcafe
Idle with zero connection
The jury is still out on this one, as I’m not able to tell whether it’s just my bad torrent selection or if it’s down to Seedcafe. But I’ve gone through long periods where there is no torrent activity on my account at all. Just to be sure I tested this by adding the torrents onto my utorrent client on my laptop and I was able to connect and begin downloading.
WebGUI
I’m not sure what WebGUI they are using but it’s very basic, doesn’t even have a preferences option, so you cannot unpack torrents, you cannot set up a watch folder to drop your .torrent files in, it doesn’t even display the tracker message.
Not really 100Mb/s
The services is advertised as 100Mb/s, therefore speeds should max at 12.5MB/s. I was able to get a max of 4MB/s that’s less than a third of the stated speed.
Good customer service
With that in mind, I was able to contact the staff and they were very speedy with responding and were knowledgeable with torrents. They helped me out many times, and even gave me a complementary upgrade to a slightly more expensive plan.
January 10th, 2012 at 11:14 pm
Been using seedcafe for a while now, quite pleased with the performance. Prices could be a little bit cheaper though
January 23rd, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Got my account setup in 24 hours. Though the webgui crashed a few times, but the torrents still seeding and I could ftp to the server, the webgui just couldn’t load.
All it took was an email and within minutes the webgui was restarted by the admin.
I signed up to the 1TB UL plan with 1Gbps connection, max download was 25 MB/s and max upload was 17 MB/s. I got close to 600Gb total upload in a month, which is fairly decent.
I’ve used package 6 which cost $35. Don’t know what the max ftp speed is, because my home connection is slow and seedcafe maxed it out.
February 16th, 2012 at 5:52 am
I have been using seed cafe for a while now. While it is my first ssedbox, I can still say this: The customer service is OUTSTANDING compared to any other service I have heard people use. That alone gives me security in using their service and that is why I do not mind spending the little more money. Also, I was getting their largest package and eventually forgot to inform me that they upgraded me to a 800 gb seedbox! It has crashed a few times, but with the speedy response time sort of makes up for it. At least you know it will not take a while for them to reset it.
I also forgot to mention they had a complete HDD crash and was not only able to keep all my info, but they were also able to restore all my active torrents. Absolutely worth the money if not more. My seedboxes were only 320gb and they almost tripled in size. Amazing.