Introducing Bytecards
I've spend most of the last few days cooking up a nice little feature called "Bytecards". Bytecards are a way to gift / trade / sell Bytesized credits with friends, other Bytesized members or your favorite online community. It could be used to make it possible for your friends who might not have access to paypal to still get an account by trading local currency for Bytecards. You could use it to trade other digital or physical goods with your friends or you can just give it away because that's the good guy (of gal) that you are! It also makes it easier for us to sponsor certain events or give easy discounts to our twitter followers.
Their usage is very simple. To generate a Bytecard login to the website and choose "Bytecards" from the finance-menu. Now press the "Create Bytecard" button and follow the three easy steps. If all went well you should now have a unique code that you can give out!
Redeeming is even easier, just press the "Redeem Bytecard" from the same page and fill in the code, the system will check it and create a create invoice to add the funds to your account.
A few rules apply to the Bytecards.
- You need to prepay the amount you want to generate. If you want to create a 7 euro card, you need to have a balance of 7 euro.
- The minimum amount you can generate is 5 euro.
- Codes count as a purchase, people within the E.U. will sadly be also billed the 19% V.A.T.
Now as for everything I cook up this is very new so if you encounter something weird please let me or any other staffer know.
Oh and since you guys probably want to test it here are some codes to help you pay for your next month's invoice! First come, first serve. And please play nice, don't redeem multiple codes or I will just void them :]
All codes are redeemed!
bysh-zixbt-6npol-c85vh-g8p61
bysh-wn46u-zcovs-h443u-l7ao3
bysh-xv1fd-ppixz-uclkg-xq3ta
bysh-uck7n-q72b8-lrpos-p2ruf
We will be handing out codes regularly on twitter from now on, so follow us @bytesizedboxes if you weren't already :)
Have fun!
Animazing
The Barbecue Box Beta!
Today we want to announce a new plan that we are testing: the Barbecue Box. We are trying something different this time, the most significant change; It's not unmetered. We wanted to offer boxes with more upload speed but offering 1Gbit unmetered is just not affordable. To make this plan feasible we are imposing upload limits instead of going with "unmetered".
These are the specs:
Barbecue Box 450GB diskspace 1Gbit download speed 300Mbit upload per user 5TB Upload limit per month 20 Euro a monthThis is a first for us, so we might be tweaking the plan a bit. If we make changes we will always notify you of the changes before hand.
The servers we will use for this plan are connected to a 1Gbit pipe but we limit each user's speed to 300Mbit upload. We hope that imposing limits will give each member a fair share of the available resources. Due to the upload limitations for this plan we have high hopes that there will always be enough bandwidth available for you to burst to 300Mbit, but real usage should prove our theories.
If you go over your 5TB upload quota you will be limited to 2Mbit untill your new invoice is generated, this is when the quota is reset. We have a limited amount of slots available, if all goes well we will have an unlimited supply soon.
What are you waiting for? Go ahead and grab a limited supply slice to provide us with valuable feedback! If you have any questions, please leave us a message in the comments. :)
Integrating Bytesized & Bytesized VPS
More then a year ago we launched Bytesized-VPS BETA. We wanted to offer the more experienced user more freedom to do what they wanted with their accounts and VPSs were the ideal way to do it. Originally we had a lot of internal discussion about wether to build the VPS part as a separate service or build into our website. In the end I forced the decision in favor of building it as a separate service. I know now that that was not the best option.
Having to deal with two separate codebases, two separate administrations and keeping track of support for two different sites really divided our attention. As an end result Bytesized-vps, and it's members, didn't get the loving it deserved.
But that's all changing now! We just released the first bit of code that will integrate Bytesized-VPS with Bytesized. Over the coming month we will be moving all current Bytesized-vps members and data to the normal Bytesized site. This will also pave the way for a long over due update to our VPS-plans and our special Bytesized Debian Template.
All our Bytesized-VPS members will be getting an email soon to let them know how the migration will proceed.
tl;dr: We are integrating Bytesized-VPS into the Bytesized-hosting site so we can offer better services & support.
ByteSized 2.0 is here!
Today marks a important milestone in Bytesized history! Today we are upgrading Bytesized with all-new plans, a new layout and new features.
A fresh new design
Thanks to your support the Bytesized website has grown a lot over the last 17 months. As we have continued to add features and goodies, our old layout had begun to show its age. Things became more and more cluttered so we decided to scrap the layout and start from scratch. Today we launch the new site, with a new menu structure that better supports our content and looks a lot lighter and fresher. We are really excited about the upgrade, and we think you will be as well.
A new provider
Now that the obvious thing is out of the way let's get to the important bits. We feel that Bytesized's strong suit is our dedication to providing our members the best service we can. Over the past few months it became apparent that the weakest link in our support structure is our current hosting provider. It was clear that if we wanted to provide a better experience for the community then we were going to have to find a new host. That day has come. We are therefore proud to announce a new partnership with Leaseweb, the leading dedicated hosting provider in Europe.
LeaseWeb will provide us with better hardware, better routing, more options for future growth, and, most importantly, even better service which we will gladly pass on to you! This agreement is a huge step forward for the Bytesized community.
A limited time offer
We would like to move all of our customers to the new, improved service as quickly as possible. Therefore, we will be giving all of our current members a limited-time exclusive upgrade opportunity. Select members will be able to upgrade their plans and move to a superior LeaseWeb box at no extra charge for three months. We are offering it on a per-server basis. After the three month trial period ends, you will be able to continue on that plan for a small increase in pricing (detailed in the chart below) or drop to a lower tier if price is a more primary concern.
Gourmet Box: 300GB diskspace, first three months: €14, thereafter €15.
Double Binge Box: 600GB diskspace, first three months: €16, thereafter €18.
Sous Chef's Box: 900GB diskspace, first three months: €24, thereafter €27.
Chef's Suprise: 1.8TB diskspace, first three months: €46, thereafter €50.
Again, these plans are only available to current members and for a limited time. This offer at these prices will never be available for new members. Only members currently using our previous plans (Lunch Box, Dinner Box, Binge Box) are eligible.
If you are eligible for the upgrade you will receive an email and you will see the following message when you are logged in on our website. Just follow the instructions to reserve your spot. You can apply for an upgrade at anytime upto the 9th of June as we will start the first deployments around this date. When we are deploying the new accounts we will give priority to the bigger plans over the smaller ones. When you are deployed to one of the new servers you will receive a refund in credits for the amount of days left on your old plan. You can read about the whole procedure here.
Loyalty discounts
With the new plans we are also launching two new features that we feel will reward loyal members: Referral and Time-based discounts.
You will receive a 1% discount on all your invoices for each active member you referred to Bytesized. Note that your referrals should have an active box, otherwise they won't give you a discount. You can view your referrals here.
The other discount is based on the age of your active box. If your box is older then 6 months you will automatically receive a 5% discount, when your box is a year old this will be increased to 10%. These discounts only apply to the new plans and will not work on our old plans. Both type of discounts stack so in an ideal situation you could get up to 20% discount on your boxes. These discounts are not set in stone and we might need to adjust them in the future.
We are very excited about the new plans, servers and provider and we really hope you guys love it as well. Because in the end everything we do is to give you guys a better experience.
The Bytesized Team
Here is a little mini-f.a.q., feel free to leave questions in the comments.
Why is my server not eligible?
Server eligibility is based on server renew date with server.lu. Once current round of upgrades finishes we will probably offer the same possibility to other users.
Will you be transfering my data from the old box to the new one?
No, all your data will be lost when we deploy you to one of our new servers. Moving all those accounts is just to big of task and will severely slow down this transition.
I don't see the message that I'm eligible for the new plans!
We are not moving everybody at the same time, once the first batch of servers are moved we will start the process again. Just sit tight and keep your eye on the site news and blog for updates.
Do the new servers still come with unlimited bandwidth?
Yes, servers are on 100Mbit unmetered line .
I've had my old plan for over six months, I want to move but wouldn't I start all over again for my time-discount?
No, when you upgrade to our new plans we will copy you deployment date from your old account over to the new one. The time based discount starts working right away if you apply.
If everybody gets deployed at the same time, wouldn't that result in slower servers since everybody is playing with their new toys at the same time.
Yes, I'm afraid that is a real risk. We have bought a large batch of servers so we are spreading the accounts as equally as possible very likely that during the first week the server will feel slower then you are used to. Don't worry though this problem will solve itself over time.
What's the hardware like?
Enterprise level components, more disks to spread disk input/out, and a faster cpu!
What if I don't want to move, I love my server as it is.
Because we need to cancel a whole lot of servers we might be forced to move you, and your data, to a server we are not canceling.
I still have a question! I'm going to mail you!
Please don't! If all of you start emailing me I will have to answer the same questions over and over again, please ask it here in the comments so other members can benefit from it as well :)
Invoicing and VAT for our EU members
We believe that being honest is always a good strategy, in good as well as in bad times. Unfortunately today is one of those bad times. From this moment on we are changing the way we deal with VAT. We will be adding it on top of the price instead of including it. Let us explain why:
We broke even last year, just barely, and although we are not looking to become millionaires, not making any money is the other side of the spectrum. Our long standing members know how much love and sweat we put into ByteSized and although we appreciate getting love in return, it doesn't pay the bills ;). There were a few external reasons for not making any money most of them involve providers screwing us over one way or an other. But there was one that was our own fault. Not charging any VAT on top of our prices. If you are a company in a country that is a member of the European Union you have to charge VAT (19% in our case) for each invoice for consumers inside the EU. Now we did not charge our members for the VAT but did have to pay it as a result each sale to a consumer within the EU either made us (almost) no profit depending on the plan.
So the first step in becoming a healthier company is making sure the VAT gets added on top of our prices instead of included. Each new invoice that will be generated starting today should have the correct amount automatically added to the invoice if you apply for VAT. Our website will determine if you apply for VAT by looking at the country you filled in during signup, if you think you might have given the wrong country you can change them from the "Account" page on our website.
This will be the first change we will be making to ensure we stay in business for a long time. There will be some more (more postive) things coming in the near future :)
Thanks for sticking with us so far <3
Seedbox 101 – The Guide to Seedboxing and Seedbox providers
A lot of people on our IRC or in forums who haven't ever had a seedbox don't quite know how to find a provider that suits their needs and, since they have no experience in the area, don't know how all the seedboxing stuff actually works. In this article I will try to describe how a provider works, how you can tell a good provider from a bad one and how to find the one that works best for you.
From the user perspective a seedbox is some kind of account on a server somewhere in a datacenter usually with a 100Mbit (or faster) connection. You can access your torrent-client on this server via a web-interface. You download the torrents on the server and then bring them home using FTP or a similar technique. From the seedbox provider standpoint something like the following happens: In it's simpelest form a provider simply buys a server, divides it in smaller pieces by some means and sells it on. Different providers use different techniques but the following are the two most commonly used methods of achieving this:
On the one hand you have shared servers. These are the type you will come across the most often. For this technique you simply get a server and create a normal account for each user you want to add to a server. The provider has admin rights on the server and simply configures the normal accounts to only allow access to one certain folder on the server and a few applications like a torrent-client. As a user you are unable or not allowed to install application because this may interfere with the rest of the users you share a server with. For example you could setup a webserver on a port that is being used by an other user's torrent client.
The other method is by using Virtual Private Servers (VPS). You still divide the server up into smaller pieces but this time a small piece is a server of it's own. This way if you buy a slot you have full administrative rights and are thus enabled to install anything you like on the server. This method often requires a more elaborate setup behind the scenes and will (always) be more expensive.
Since you divide a server into smaller pieces deciding how many users you allow on a server will decide how much you pay for your piece and what kind of performance you can expect. There are three main limiting factors for all servers that dictate price and performance: Available diskspace, bandwidth and harddisk performance.
In order to provide a usable service while making profit, seedbox providers have to use mixed calculations, assuming that not everyone will be maxing out his part of the server 24/7 (as this is not the case). Of course this presents the danger of overselling, which is a popular technique that some of the more shadier providers intentionally employ to draw you to their service. Overselling basically means they put more people on a server than that server can handle (either bandwidth, or harddisks wise), allowing them to lower the price per user. This is also why there is sometimes such a big difference in price between providers. Like for most things: "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is". So the first tip I want to give you is: Always try and find out how many people a provider puts on a server and compare.
I think the the topic of bandwidth deserves a little explanation alone. There is no such thing is free bandwidth. To connect one datacenter to the other a connection is needed, transfers through those connections will always cost you a certain amount per Gigabyte (or TB or PB) transfered. Offering unlimited traffic and being cheap at the same time is not really possible and in the end someone has to pay for it all. Currently most server providers don't offer true unlimited bandwidth anymore. OVH/Kimsufi still offer "unlimited" but will reduce your server speed from 100MBit to 10MBit when you pass a certain amount of traffic. Server.lu officially states you get 5TB unlimited transfer per single server before they throttle your servers, although unofficially some seedbox providers have gone past this and have not been throttled. We at ByteSized pay a certain amount more to make sure we always have unlimited transfer. Now when a provider advertises with "unlimited" transfer always do research and try to find out which server provider they use; and if they have anything about throttling in their fineprints. The sad thing is that some providers will even blatently lie about their limits and sell you unlimited stuff that in the end has a 10TB limit. Yes, we are looking at you Santrex. Tip 2: Always research bandwidth limits a provider may or may not have.
Each provider will have his own strong suits. We feel we offer a lot of options (OpenVPN, different clients, VNC access) and offer some of the best service but these might not be so important for you personally.
One more thing we would advice you to stay away from are TorrentFlux based providers. TF is a very outdated client which performs subpar. uTorrent is still very popular on seedboxes mainly because the client is so popular on the windows platform and people prefer things they already know. We talked about this before but we feel like uTorrent should not be used on seedboxes if possible (for linux boxes anyway); if a provider only supports uTorrent perhaps it's best to keep looking. Now Deluge, Transmission and rTorrent are all good options because they are natively available on Linux. Especially Deluge and Transmission have a great underlying architecture that split the front-end from the backend making it very easy to manage your torrents from you local pc.
Getting stuff from your seedbox to your pc is an other important part. Most providers will offer at least FTP access but the better ones will also supply you with SFTP (FTP over SSH) and FTPS (FTP using SSL). The last two are especially helpful if your provider throttles your FTP traffic. Some providers also offer HTTP access but we personally don't offer it because not all users know how to handle this and forming some crafty google queries will often land you in a sea of warez from other providers.
If you don't consider yourself to be a linux guru then you will probably want some sort of remote desktop access. VNC is method to control your seedbox through a familiar desktop environment. With this desktop you can browse your sites that require you to login on the IP you download from; control your server-side applications or chat. If you are awesome at Linux then you will most likely appreciate SSH access but I won't need to explain why you want it, you know why! There are some other handy extras; proxy servers or OpenVPN so you can anonymize your internet behaviour. Usenet or Rapidshare downloaders. Decide the applications and connection methods you would like to have. As you can see the options are endless so: Don't settle for just Web-interface and ftp access anymore.
Now when things with your seedbox go wrong you need to be sure that things will be handled well. One of the problems with seedboxes is that they are a luxury item and most people won't pay more then they really need to. This decision has an impact on the provider end as well, the hardware used is mostly lower-end hardware that can have some problems now and again. When this happens you want to make sure your provider will do anything they can to resolve the issues and in a timely fashion. So before picking your provider try and get a feeling for the place. Try sending them an email, drop by the live chat or create a ticket on the site. See in what timeframe they respond and how. Although there is often a huge difference in pre-sales communication and post-sale it might give you some insight into their support structure.
Now the last bit you might want to do is look for reliable reviews. The best place to find these are on tracker forums. The problem with the internet in general is that it's very easy to create fake reviews on review sites. On tracker forums the opinions are often real and genuine. So visit your favorite sites and look around for seedbox threads most of the time you can find some valuable information in those type of threads.
Now I want to leave you with some guestimates for pricing since that's an other question that I come across a lot. In general a 100GB unlimited seedbox should be priced somewhere between 10 and 16 euro depending on servers used and the seedbox provider in question.
If you have any other questions or suggestion please let us know (feel free to leave a comment!) and we will try and add them to the article.
Good luck trying to find your ideal provider!
ByteSized VPS
As soon of you might have picked up we've been working hard at our new sister-service ByteSized VPS. As we will soon be starting a more open Beta for existing ByteSized members we feel it's time to tell you a bit more about what a VPS is and who might be interested in one.
Let's start with Wikipedia's definition of a VPS:
"A virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) is a method of splitting a server. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted."
A VPS is a server in a server as it were, it operates as a dedicated server; you have complete administrator access, can reboot it, can re-install it and can choose what ever operating system you would like, it even comes with your own dedicated IP.
Now why would you want a VPS?
- Complete freedom to do whatever you would like, since you have administrative access there is no limit to the applications you could run on it. Want to host a website; install a webserver. Want to setup an irc-server? Then do so!
- Better resource management, the technologies that make VPS's work comes with a whole set of resource management tools this way we can make sure each user gets the resources it deserves;
- Dedicated IP; some trackers still have problems from connections from a shared ip, having a dedicated IP resolves this issue.
- Better monitor tools; You can check out how much bandwidth you used this month, what your load averages are like and how much memory you are using.
- Ready to Rock Templates; Because we know not everybody is a Linux guru but would like to use a VPS because of the other pro's we created two ready to rock Desktop/Seedbox templates. Setup with rTorrent/ruTorrent / Deluge or Transmission and all kinds of other handy tools. You can check out the wiki for screenshots and application list.
Now sadly it's not all fun and games and there are some cons as well.
- It's more expensive; IP's and the new management system means higher overhead costs.
- Less support; With great power comes great responsibility. The stuff we deliver in our custom templates should work out of the box and if not we will provide support for it but everything that goes beyond this, you do at your own risk. We'll do our best, but we can't provide support for every application there is.
Once we go out of BETA we should have VPS's in different countries, so far we are trying to get servers in France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and The USA.
Existing members should keep a close eye on the news. We will post initial pricing soon and we will also start adding some more people to the BETA.
OpenVPN + Open Registration == WIN?
We've been very busy with ByteSized VPS (more on that in a later article) over the last couple of months and because of this we didn't give our ByteSized Boxes the love it deserved. That's why today we have a little freebie for all our current and future users.
All our boxes will come with VPN-access from today on out. VPN is a way for you to conduct your internet business in total anonymity by routing all traffic on a secure connection to our servers. To use our VPN-service you will need to install and configure an OpenVPN client. We have some basic instructions on this wiki-page. Something else we decided to install for everybody is SABnzbd.
Another announce we have for you today is that from this moment on we will be having open signups for a while. We might make it permanent or just a few weeks, we don't know yet. But for now tell your friends they don't have to wait around twitter any more. Because of this we can't guarantee our "within minutes" setup time anymore, instead we will announce it on twitter if the setup is going to be longer then average.
We are also working on a new wiki-system, we are leaving the custom-made wiki for a more open wikimedia-wiki. This new wiki will hold both the articles for bytesized-vps and bytesized-hosting. Moving all entries from the old to the new wiki might take some time and will not be done in a day, so for now just use the old wiki till we moved all stuff accross. We do want to ask you that if you want to create a new page do it on the new wiki which can be found here.
More information on Bytesized-VPS will come in the following days, for now you can find a short F.A.Q. on the Wiki.
Overall price increase
Today we have some sad news: We are forced to raise all our prices by 1.5 euro per plan as of now.
Let us explain how this came to be:
A few weeks ago we've started noticing some of our servers getting less network throughput than expected. At that time, we investigated all possible hardware and software issues we could come up with, but couldn't find anything that could cause this kind of behavior. After multiple inquiries to our provider regarding the issue, they finally told us that our servers were using too much bandwidth and because of this, they were being throttled! Although their plans and terms of services say that they offer unlimited bandwidth, this isn't actually the case. Since, contrary to common belief, bandwidth is not free we understand that providers offering unlimited bandwidth have to come up with a mixed calculation. They expect that some users use alot of bandwidth while others compensate for this by using less, since someone has to pay for all that bandwidth in the end! The problem is, the calculation isn't working out for them currently. Not willing to compromise the quality of our service, we have now negotiated a new deal with our provider to guarantee completly unthrottled servers. This comes with a price though.
We do understand that a lot you decided to go for us because we provided a really cheap service and we very much regret that we can't afford to sustain our current pricing scheme anymore. We do hope however to have proven that we are not only cheap, but also strive to offer the best service out there. If anything, this situation has made us even more eager to look into other solutions, we could bring to you in order to enhance your ByteSized experience.
One of the first new additions to our range of products will be the launch of our VPS service, which will feature less people per server, better resource management and more customization options. Tailored for those users who want a little more bang for their buck. We expect the public beta to start in the following weeks.
We hope that you understand that where we come from and we feel that this was the only option to sustain our level of service.
Hello world!
The typical opening post of any good blog: "Hello World!". With this blog we want to keep our members, future members and everybody else in the loop about ByteSized, torrents, technology and development.
We will have posts adressing all these topics, some will give you some background information about ByteSized, some will be how-to's on a specific subject, and others might be just random rants.
We will try to get at least one blog post out each week.
We hope you will enjoy our writing.