ive been with bitesized for a few months and I can safely say that they are the best beyond comparison for the following reasons 1) IRC support is triple XL, theres always someone there to help, even non staffers are great, one guy gave me 4 hour undivided attention. 2) great upload and download speeds with no box hoggers on shared slices 3) fast and efficeint and friendly service 4) a really great seedbox community who give loads of help especially to seedbox/linux noobs like I was 5) a great place to learn just tune in to the IRC page 6) they cannot be beaten on price

About a year or so ago I decided that I wanted to start downloading .torrent files, but did not want my poor quality internet speeds to be tied up trying to keep up a good ratio. So I looked into using a SeedBox. I found “Bytesized” who were a new company at that time and decided to join up with them. It was the BEST thing that I ever did on the internet! The speeds that they provide with both downloads and uploads, soon meant that I could download all of the .torrent files I could ever want to watch….yet at the same time, and this was important, get some fantastic ratios through seeding through my “Bytesized” seedbox. Initially on joining a year ago I did not know much about what I was really doing, but along with the fast speeds I also found that the staff at “Bytesized” were exceptionally helpful and gave me all the help I could have needed. In addition their fast responses to any questions I had made dealing with them a pleasure. I would have no problem in recommending “Bytesized Hosting”, they give excellent value for money, and an even better service that I think is second to none.

Are you a heavy torrenter or a casual user? Do you have experience with linux/seedboxing or are you are complexe novice? Do you understand RSS, Flexget, Deluge? Actually none of these questions matter when you’re part of the Bytesized Community; let me explain.

- Support:
The support infrastructure at Bytesized is without a doubt the best I have come across in terms of knowledgable staff, response time and reliability. There are several methods of obtaining help, all of which have their uses.
-Tickets:
The ticketing system is available to all Bytesized members 24 hours a day and responses are generally within the hour (almost always sooner). If the staff are sleeping or unavailable then you’ll be pleasantly suprised by the amount of support you can acquire from fellow members. There is a true community spirit about the place, it isn’t just another seedbox provider devoid of personality.
-IRC
The Bytesized IRC is always open for current or perspective members to come and have a chat with the staff or other members. Many friendships have developed since Bytesized and it isn’t uncommon to find several members playing online games together (Bytesized even has a minecraft server!)
-Wiki
Bytesized has a fully functional wiki containing everything from beginner to advanced tutorials and guides for anybody struggling to configure or manage their seedbox. Once more this is supported and maintained by Bytesized members and staff alike.

-Reliability:
I don’t remember ever having downtime, let alone needing to worry about it!
Regardless, hardware does fail, configurations break and there is always the potential for things to go wrong. However that won’t stop you from enjoying your seedbox – the staff always explain problems fully and give an rough timeframe for a fix. In some cases I have seen members transferred to another server within Bytesized as the staff decided the downtime was unacceptably long. You really can’t ask for better service and reliability than that.

-Features:
There are honestly too many features to list, but the main ones would be VNC, FTP (SFTP and FTPS), WebGUI, ThinClient (Deluge), OpenVPN, Proxy (SSH Tunneling) and even direct SSH access. Do you need something installing that isn’t available? Ask the staff and as long as it isn’t too resource hungry – you can have it!

-Speed/Bandwidth:
All of the servers are connected to a dedicated 100mbit link with UNLIMITED bandwidth, that’s right.. you can upload and download as much as dare without having to monitor bandwidth stats or be concerned about traffic limiting that other providers enforce. Do note that all of these servers are shared amongst other members, so although you won’t see the full 100mbit it isn’t uncommon to have fast speed uploads (6-8MB/s). I’m with another provider who has bandwidth limits and it really isn’t fun if you have to check your quota before downloading something.

-Price:
Considering all of the above points (none of which are exaggerated), the tiny price of 13.50 Euro is not only amazing but it is completely affordable for just about anybody. The phrase “Value for money” just doesn’t seem powerful enough to explain how good this service really is. If you’re still reading then I hope by now that you’ve signed up and are alread using your seedbox! If you haven’t.. then what are you waiting for?!

I am not affiliated with Bytesized in any way. I’m just a very satisfied user who has been with these guys for almost 10 months. If I had to chose one provider out of all that I have used in the past.. Bytesized would win hands down.

This is a review for Bytesized-Hosting’s shared seedboxes.

Cost
When it comes down to it many will decide their seedbox provider based on price/hd space ratio. If you looked around, you’d probably find a cheaper provider that offers a comparable hd space. However, a purchase isn’t and shouldn’t be single issue and at the end of the month a difference of $3 isn’t going to break the bank. With Bytesized, you may not be paying the cheapest (it is however one of them) but you know you’ll be getting a consistent service and support should you need it. Not a service that sometimes kinda works and support might answer in a couple of days with that cheaper reseller. Pricing isn’t the only way for resellers to compete.

Speeds and Bandwidth
This is another major factor when people decide on their provider. Every seedbox provider will advertise a 100Mbit connection for their shared services. The difference is how each provider goes about handling their users. Some may have a metered bandwidth (a cap on upload) or oversell their boxes (putting more user then their servers can handle). Other providers will only allow a certain amount of active torrents (3-7) depending on the reseller. That’s the total number of torrents that can be downloading AND seeding at any given time. This really defeats the purpose of having a seedbox in my opinion. The entire point of getting one is to seed.

Bytesized does none of these and you can verify this from the load average and speeds. Once upon a time, they use to be cheaper (by €1.5) but they found out that their provider was throttling certain servers and thus, had two choices. They could have ignored this fact and continued charging their customers while still claiming “unmetered”, or they could have told the truth. They did the latter and they’re the better for it. They paid their provider a certain amount to make sure that they were indeed getting unmetered. Naturally, this had to trickle down to the customers. And the point of this little story? Well, it shows that the admins are stand up people. They actually care about their service and will work to maintain even if it loses them customers due to a slight bump their monthly fee. They strive to maintain their quality service.

Features
This involves the extras that people don’t usually look at and Bytesized offers quite a bit. I’ll just list them and give a short explanation.
Sabnzb+ – for users that want to download from usenet
VNC access, WebUIs
SFTP, FTPS – for those who have isps that may throttle their connection
SSH – for a variety of things (you can monitor bandwidth for example)

You’ll see in the Features list that Bytesized offers a “VPN trial”. That’s true in a sense. You’re allowed to get a refund within 24 hours of your deployment if you are not satisfied with your slice.
In actuality Bytesized offers VPN-access with all of their boxes. This routes all your traffic through the seedbox’s ip address. You can probably imagine how useful this is.
There are companies that charge the price of a seedbox ($15-17) for just a VPN and Bytesized is offering it without additional fees.

Support
I think this one of the high points of Bytesized-Hosting and as allowed it to expand largely due to word of mouth. They have a ticket system that is divided into public and private tickets. Public tickets can be answered by anyone and if you have an issue, you’ll usually make one of these. Since anyone can answer them, tickets can be and usually are answered within minutes since the customer base is extremely active. The private tickets are mainly for financial issues or things only staff can do.

The other side to the Bytesized’s support is its IRC channel. During business hours, the channel is active and this is what allows tickets to be answered so quickly (an irc bot notifies the channel when a ticket is made/replied to). They usually prefer that customers go to the IRC channel to get help since they can troubleshoot in real time and it feels more personal. They’ll (the admins and customers) even answer questions that don’t relate to slice issues ranging from torrenting basics to unix.
You’ll also see the admins (It’s a two man company in addition to two non-paid staffers) quite frequently on the channel helping out. This isn’t some large impersonal reseller where you might not even know who the admin is nor will you feel that you’re “just another customer”.
Bytesized also has several wiki articles to cover common issues and/or pre-sales questions and how-tos. All of them personally written by knowledgeable customers or the admins.

Naturally, no support is perfect and the support system has its dead hours just like every other company. These are the hours when the majority of people in the world are asleep. Weekends also aren’t as active since many of the usual helpers aren’t around.

The Bad
No reseller is prefect and Bytesized isn’t an exception. They don’t allow public trackers and one notable private tracker: torrentleech. While this doesn’t bother me, it’s considered “bad” because some past customers have. Banning public trackers and torrentleech loses them many potential customers that go elsewhere, but they do so to maintain their service. Public trackers are banned because thousands of leechers jump on public torrents and if you’re on a 100Mbit connection, that one torrent will be taking up the majority of the available bandwidth. It takes a single person using a public tracker to ruin the experience for everyone else. As for torrentleech, google “torrentleech + DCMA”. It’s for your protection as much as there’s.

I can only agree with what everyone said, this is one of the best providers out there. I’ve had my box there for a couple of months now and the speeds, features and reliability are top notch. The servers are very reliable and even if some go down, admins are working on fixing them within minutes.
But the most amazing thing about Bytesized-Hosting are the helpful admins and even non-staffers, which help out every seedbox newbie with great attention. If you have no idea about terminal commands, linux, settings or need a solution to a torrent-related application, these guys will help you out almost 24/7 with a very friendly attitude, even towards beginners who are just getting into seedboxes, like me. They’ll either guide you through fixing the problem yourself (i.e. you actually learn to handle issues yourself) or they’ll fix it for you right away.
I cannot see any other provider for this price that offers such a high level of helpful support.

If you want to find a negative aspect about the service, there might be one or two for some people
-no public trackers
-no tl
In my opinion, those are actually positive restriction as it shows that the staff puts security and reliability on top of the list. TL had some issues with the DCMA lately and you should have stopped using public trackers ages ago. There are plenty of alternatives out there, which offer just as much or even more and are allowed here.

Signed up for a Lunch Box last week. The DL speed is good (8-5Mb/s) average. I feel the UL speed is on the slow side. But ok so far. The launching of my box was less than 8 hours. Some sites that i go to that are private are banned so that kinda sucks. Please check their Blacklist of sites. I had a small problem with my box when i rebooted it, but i rebooted it again a second time and it was back up again. Will write a follow-up review after a month.

-jgoz