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.

1. 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.
2. The minimum amount you can generate is 5 euro.
3. 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

These are the specs:

This 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. :)

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.

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 :)

Before I state what we are going to do, I would like to give an overview of what has happened internationally in the past few days. The country of Japan has been shocked by one of the worlds largest earthquakes to date. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake not only destroyed multiple villages within the northern portions of Japan, completely destroying some villages, but there are continued aftershocks that are still making the buildings in Japan sway, as well as triggering massive tsunamis that are destroying entire villages and wiping away everything the Japanese had, up to a point worse than the Indonesian tsunamis from a few Christmases ago. Not only that, but the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor is witnessing a meltdown and massive cooling failures, with explosions in multiple reactors as well as possible meltdowns within the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. Furthermore, the death toll in Japan has surpassed 1,700. While Japan is more technologically advanced than a majority of first world countries, there are some things that technology cannot do. Technology cannot donate blood to survivors. Technology cannot rebuild the loss of human life. Technology cannot erase the tragedy of the still unfolding events within Japan.

So with that said, Bytesized-Hosting will be acting as a community in good spirits and help the Japanese people as the Japanese have helped us. For every payment made to us in the month of March we will be donating one euro to the Japanese Red Cross. Essentially, we will (more or less) be donating all of our profit from the month of March to the Japanese crisis. Furthermore, everyone that pays their invoices in March will receive in indeterminate amount of cookies towards your account. We are doing this not only to set a precedent, but because we want to see Japan restored to good health.

Those who know me from What.cd or from any IRC channel know that I take jokes too far and make fun of things that shouldn't be funny. Regardless of what I say, this is something I feel very strongly about and believe is a step towards helping the international community when in crisis, as well as giving good footing between the BitTorrent community and the physical community. On top of this, I strongly recommend that you do what you can to help the Japanese. You can donate specifically to the Japanese crisis from multiple Red Cross websites, as well as donating directly to the Japanese Red Cross from Google. If you decide against going with the Red Cross, amongst whatever charity you donate to, try to not donate to any religious organizations. A major portion of your donation goes towards overhead, with little (if any) going to the matter at hand. The Japanese people are also recommending this through multiple social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as the live feeds from watching the NHK, NNN, JNN and TBS. If you cannot donate, try and do what you can. Even retweeting a donation link is better than nothing. You may also make donations from your mobile device by texting "REDCROSS" to 90999. Donate blood, donate tools, do anything. You may not receive a physical return, but even the coldest of hearts will feel the warmth of helping out a people in need. Look below for links on finding people you know in Japan, as well as links to live Japanese news feeds as other news sources are generally behind when it comes to what is currently happening.
If you would like to stay up to date with the latest news from Japan, the following streams will be of great use:
NHK World in English (becomes a 30 minute loop)
NHK-GTV in Japanese (NHK's News Service Channel)
TBStv in Japanese (TBS' News Channel)

BlueCrystal, for ByteSized

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

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!

• Expanded to 84 servers
• 1256 users signed-up (although not active at the same time)
• 1517 support tickets created (and answered)
• We had 5690 support replies in total
• 1932 of replies were by me (Animazing) that's 5.2 replies per day.  :=]
• Our servers have a general ratio of 3.56
• Collected 481 twitter followers
• Grew our website codebase to 3252 lines and our database to 3MB

Now a birthday is always a good time to reflect back and look to the future. Let's start with some people who made this last year possible.

First up are our early adopters. When we just came out we had no reputation and no experience, just the promise that we would do our best to give you the best service out there. Luckily there were people that took the risk and signed up for our beta service and gave great  and useful feedback. As a little thank you to all these early adopters all the members with a Lunch Box (BETA) or Snack Box (BETA) plan will receive this month completly free of charge; thanks guys!

Next up is BlueCrystal. He came around our irc channel a few weeks after we launched and stuck around. He quickly got up on our support ladder by always helping out on tickets and answering questions on IRC. Thanks to him our US based customers could get some support during their days when me and ps were fast asleep. (Admins need sleep too, don't let them tell you otherwise)

Another important group for us are our regulars on IRC who can be recognized by the voice in our main channel #bytesized. Some people who have contributed to ByteSized by helping members in our irc-channel out, basically being our first line support when we are not around. All voiced people on IRC will get a free month of service as well.

Last but not least are all our other members. A big thank you for using our service and hopefully enjoying it. We will try and keep our service levels up, improve our software stack even more and hopefully try out some new plans and providers in the near future. Remember that if you have any ideas for us to improve our service we have a uservoice page here.

Let's make our next year even better!

I don't think achievements need any explanation anymore these days, big games have been coming with unlockable achievements for some time now and it opens up a whole new dimension of re-playability. So today I took a few hours and built in some achievements to the ByteSized website. Some are hard to get, others easy but overall I think it might add a little fun :)

ByteSized accounts now come with a public profile because achievements are no fun if you can't show them off. By default these profiles are hidden for anybody besides yourself, but you can choose to activate them if you want. You can do this on your account-settings page. You can take a look at BlueCrystal's profile so you guys can see what a profile looks like. On your dashboard you will find the link to your profile (under helpful links) if you want to take a look and see what achievements you have unlocked already.

Now one of the achievements involves the amount of people you referred to us, so we needed to code this up as well. Next to the "public profile link" will be a new link named "My referral link" this is the link you can give out to your friends if they want to sign up. Referrals are the achievements that earn you the most points so if you want to go for the top10 that's the way to go. Now there will be some balancing of the different points achievements are worth, so it might be that you have 5 one day and 20 the next. If you have balancing suggestions feel free to post them.

Yes, there is also a top10. The top10 will list the users who have enabled their public profile and have the most achieved points. Just an other fun little way to show off. You can find this link on your dashboard. Now for now these features are suppose to be fun but we might decide to make the points exchangeable for goodies.

I hope you guys enjoy this little add-on, so I can think of new achievements to add! If not, I will just remove it and accept that I wasted a day of coding ;)

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?

1. 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!
2. 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;
3. Dedicated IP; some trackers still have problems from connections from a shared ip, having a dedicated IP resolves this issue.
4. 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.
5. 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.