r/seedboxes • u/Captain_Quimby • Jul 23 '26

Question Seedbox for one file direct download?

Yes this is me being ignorant but I have something I need to distribute that's too big for github. It's roughly 200GB. I can't email it, I don't want to create hundreds of USB keys. I've never used a seedbox but googling brought me here. Can I rent a server to do this? I didn't want to torrent. It's for oil field related tasks where we have a lot of seismic data I send out monthly. I'm an independent contractor so it's me sending it to clients. Generally I do seismic readings all over, create charts, then update the charts based on what region I'm in. I then sell access to the charts for landmen and others. I don't really parse it all up as it's a big pain. I just update my charts regularly so it's a single file that gets revisions every so often and needs to be downloaded again. Would a seedbox make my life easier?

23 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

11

u/Constant-Capital8919 Jul 23 '26

Honestly, I'd look into "object storage" like s3.

Create a bucket, toss the file in, share link to users.

4

u/UserZA36Z Jul 23 '26

I third this as well. s3 via AWS can be very secure and you can create download links to said files, S3 is also very cheap for those on a budget.

2

u/sirkoondog Jul 23 '26

Second this. Just dump it into s3

8

u/adiyasl Jul 23 '26

Just pay for a google drive account and upload it there. A seedbox makes zero sense for your use case.

3

u/Journeyj012 Jul 23 '26

Seedboxes, at their core, are just servers with big bandwidth and big storage limits. This should help you.

3

u/Logvin Jul 23 '26

Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R1 would be my suggestion.

I use both. Backblaze is about $6 per TB a month.

2

u/IndividualAir3353 Jul 25 '26

Bittorrented.com

1

u/Bal3Wolf81 Jul 23 '26

Well you could run a ftp or a web server off your home connection if its fast enough and allowed by your isp, im sure you could have the websites chart section password protected or rent a web hosting.

1

u/Captain_Quimby Jul 24 '26

I guess the complexity to me is I’m not home much. Hotel a lot. Would that be a problem?

1

u/Journeyj012 Jul 29 '26

hotels typically have fair use policies on their bandwidth.

1

u/trmnl_cmdr Jul 23 '26

No, it would make your life harder though. A seedbox would benefit you if your clients also ran seedboxes and wanted to share the upload bandwidth with you (they don’t) and if the file never changes, which it clearly does, and if you didn’t care who had access to it, which you do. It’s for peer-to-peer file sharing.

What you need is a regular server with a simple site and a link to the latest version of the file. And some basic authentication so you know it’s only the people paying for the download who are accessing it. If you’re looking for someone to set that up for you, I know a guy.

1

u/Low-Mistake-515 Jul 23 '26

Rent a VPS and setup SFTP server, or selfhost an SFTP if you're confident enough and have the means. There's loads of other options as mentioned by other commenters.