With Netflix and other streaming platforms increasing price, I finally decided to get a seedbox for my family members’ needs with Plex/jellyfin.
My budget is 10-15 USD per month. I’m currently on the 11$ hostingby.design plan with 4TB storage and 9TB traffic, 10gbit connection. I’ve been mostly happy but,
- Their app selection feels small though I’ve found most of the mainstream stuff.
- I’m missing things like cross-seed, jellystat, jellyfin-vue, transmission and audiobookshelf.
- Not happy with how apps installed by the GitHub scripts are not available on HTTPS.
- Can’t disable ssh password login for public key, which is making me really uncomfortable.
- Their wiki seems quite sparse.
The other options I’m thinking of are:
- 13$ HDD plan at seedhost.eu - 4TB/9TB but only 1gbps, downgrade in specs but seems to have more apps.
- 14$ plan at ultra.cc with 3TB/8TB but 20gps (which feels like an overkill honestly). Also a downgrade but their wiki/app support looks top notch.
I really wish there was a way I could manage docker containers on my own on a similar shared setup without paying for a dedicated vps but haven’t found something like that so far.
Any advice regarding the other providers, experience or otherwise would be greatly appreciated :)
Don’t think about the speeds advertised by providers, you’ll never come close to them. You seem to require a media server, so give more importance to storage.
From my research comparing HostingBy, SeedHost and Ultra.cc - HostingBy has the highest €/TB rate except for the 1TB box which is ironically the highest €/TB rate
Here’s the Google Sheet if you’re interested Ignore the remarks and INR part, I’m Indian so wanted to see what I would end up paying
I will add on more providers at some point, but these 3 are the big names with decent prices and support.
As for your other problem of app selection, I don’t think you’ll find any of those in most providers natively (except for Transmission). You can request them, but its not a quick process. Instead of that, try installing them yourself. Even without root, it shouldn’t be impossible, the only thing that may be annoying is you may not be able to setup reverse proxy so you’ll need to access those services with http://ip:port
Hey, glad to see another Asian person here :)
The sheet looks really useful, thank you for sharing it. I did the same research and ended up with the same conclusion which is why I went with hostingby.design, but after interacting with the people on discord it looks like the main guy is swamped with work and unable to really make new scripts and stuff.
Ultra.cc looks to have better app support and they aren’t using swizzin as their backend but app-box or something like that.
I tried distrobox without root which doesn’t work I also tried user install using apt, but unless the whole program is a single compiled binary, it isn’t working very well.
My other complaint is that I don’t know how their reverse proxy and wildcard certs work, so I can’t even put all these unofficial things (prowlarr, overseer) behind https.
Yeah, the reverse proxy thing is kind of annoying. It seems for the most part, you’d just need to access them through
http://IP:PORTwhich I understand you’d probably not want to do. Haven’t really found a way around that but Ultra.cc supports Overseerr nativelyHostingBy seems to have really good price, but I have heard that their support is lacking and if you want answers you’re better off asking in the discord for someone else to help you out.
Ultra recently introduced a Singapore option for some of their plans which I would definitely recommend if you’re located in Asia and you’re getting it as a media server. They also let you install pyenv (for Python versions), nodejs and golang so it’s easier for you to install your own apps. There are a lot of ways to compile your own apps, it just takes a bit of learning and time
Apparently it looks like, atleast on Ultra.cc, you can add your own reverse proxy configs to .apps/nginx/proxy.d and once you restart the nginx service if will proxy your requests. It’s just up to you to configure it properly although Support won’t help you with that. I imagine the other providers also have something similar although it may not be as straightforward
Hey, you’ve been really helpful, so thank you :) The reason I didn’t go with Singapore is because my partner currently lives in the US and this is mostly for her, I have my own homelab setup that I haven’t exposed to the internet.
I’ll checkout if I can write my own nginx files on hostinby as well based on what you said :D
Ultra looks to have the most apps supported out of the box, so I might switch to them if I can’t iron out stuff on hbd. I saw that hbd has a script for homebrew of all things. Are you familiar with using brew to install stuff on Linux?
I’ve never used homebrew so I’m not sure. Looking at their discord, it’s also not supported by them so I don’t even know how you’d go about it tbh. Try it out and see if you can figure it out, maybe it’s just a simple path issue
Yeah. I got pipx and npx working so, simple things should be fine. I really wish distrobox would work but it hasn’t so far.
This is the first I’m hearing of distrobox. Guessing you need root priveleges for that?
Not really, you can use rootless docker or podman but the seedbox owners need to add you to the correct groups and they’re not willing to do that.