VPN vs Seedbox: What Is Best for Torrenting in 2024?

Media Streaming or File Sharing has become increasingly popular nowadays.

The need to share files securely has resulted in the need for a security tool to protect your IP address, provide privacy, save you from copyright trolls and DMCA letters, and prevent throttling issues by your ISP.

VPNs and Seedboxes are two such tools that can help help you torrent anonymously and save you from warning letters from your ISP, and enhance your torrenting experience.

Since you are here, you probably are one of the torrent users who wants to know which one is better. So, without delay, let’s compare VPN vs Seedbox.

How is a Virtual Private Network different from Seedbox?

In a nutshell, both VPN and Seedbox are excellent tools meant for different purposes.

On one hand, a VPN provides you with overall Internet security and anonymity, making all your online activities, including torrenting, secure from hackers, cybercriminals, and data or IP leaks.

On the other hand, Seedbox can provide you with a server to securely and anonymously download torrents at extremely fast speeds.

Keep reading to find out more…

What is a VPN?

A virtual private network, or a VPN, routes your Internet traffic through a remote server that you can choose from your VPN’s server network. This connection hides your real IP address and gives you a virtual one based on the location of the VPN server that you choose.

With numerous privacy and security features and several encryption protocols that the top-tier VPN services provide, all your online activities become private and protected against cyber threats and online snoopers.

When your virtual location or IP address gets changed to a remote country, all the geo-restricted websites and digital content accessible to the residents of this virtual country are made available to you.

Similarly, with a VPN, your BitTorrent traffic is securely transferred to the servers owned by your VPN providers, making it impossible to trace back the activity to your real IP address.

What is a Seedbox?

Seedboxes are servers (cloud-based or physical servers) exclusively used for uploading, downloading, or seeding torrents.

A Seedbox is a remote server hosted in a data center, and the Seedbox service is popular among power users in the file-sharing community because they can achieve extremely high speeds for torrenting.

Seedbox services involve a two-step process for downloading or uploading torrents. While downloading a file, you first need to download it to the Seedbox server and then from the Seedbox to your device.

Even if your torrenting activity is being tracked, one can only see the Seedbox’s IP address and not yours. So, apart from providing high speeds, Seedbox providers also offer privacy and anonymity while accessing torrent sites using their secure file transfer protocol.

A Seedbox server enables you to remotely download files and share them outside of your local network. You can access stored files by pulling them from a Seedbox server using a secure HTTPS connection.

Seedbox vs VPN: What’s best for torrenting?

Below are the advantages and disadvantages of using a Seedbox vs VPN to access a torrent site.

Advantages of using a VPN for torrenting

Here are the advantages of using virtual private networks for torrenting.

• A virtual private network offers important security features that not only protect your privacy and anonymity while torrenting, but will also provide enhanced security for your overall web access against cyber threats, data or identity theft, and, more especially, over public networks.
• VPNs help you bypass geo-restrictions and online censorship by countries or organizations and seamlessly unblock streaming sites from around the world, access geo-restricted websites, make digital purchases, and enjoy online gaming.
• VPNs can save you from the throttling that your Internet Service Provider might give you as a result of frequent torrenting. ISPs are known to throttle your bandwidth in cases of heavy downloads. However, with a VPN, your ISP won’t even know about your activities and so won’t slow down your speeds.

Disadvantages of using a VPN for torrenting

There are certain disadvantages to using a VPN service for torrenting:

• VPNs are known to slow your Internet speeds. Though reliable and premium-quality VPNs generally do not affect your Internet speeds much, your download speeds will definitely be lower than those with Seedboxes.
• VPNs are more costly, and free ones are unreliable in terms of security, privacy, and anonymity. So, using a VPN is definitely going to cost you more than using a Seedbox.
• Though your VPN provider might offer a lot of privacy features, it is still watching your activities. This is because, while connecting to a remote server, you basically transfer your online activities from your ISP to your VPN server.

Advantages of using a seedbox for torrenting

Below are the advantages of using a Seedbox by Internet users for torrenting:

• Seedboxes support torrenting at very high speeds, allowing for rapid downloading and seeding and thus maintaining the ratios required by private torrent trackers. They also offer downloads at great speeds from remote servers with dedicated servers.
• With protocols like secure FTP, FTP with TLS encryption, or Secure Shell, Seedboxes are efficient at providing you with privacy by hiding your real IP address and making only the Seedbox’s IP address visible to someone who is tracking you.
• Seedbox allows you to integrate the PLEX media server with itself, which by using you can get a large storage capacity in your Seedbox and can even stream content to any device on any connection.

Disadvantages of using a Seedbox for torrenting

Some disadvantages of using a Seedbox for torrenting are listed below:

• A Seedbox works only with torrents. While it provides excellent security and privacy to download or upload files, it won’t help you bypass censorship or geo-restrictions.
• For downloading or uploading torrents, there is a two-step process. So you actually need to get the required file twice, first to your Seedbox storage and then to your own device. Though it’s a simple procedure, for a beginner it might be annoying.

3 best VPNs for torrenting

1. ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN is one of the fastest VPNs on the market and the best option to compete with Seedbox in terms of speed.

ExpressVPN offers multiple protocols for encryption, such as OpenVPN, IKEv2/IPsec, Lightway, L2TP, and more, and numerous security and privacy features such as a Kill Switch, a zero-log policy, IPv6 and DNS leak protection, AES-256-bit encryption, and more to provide you with the best security and privacy.

ExpressVPN also offers unlimited bandwidth, so there is no limit to your torrenting, and your Internet Service Provider will have no reason to throttle you because it cannot detect your activity!

2. NordVPN

If you want to save money on a good-quality VPN, NordVPN is affordable and reliable.

With military-grade encryption mechanisms, essential security and privacy features, the use of protocols like NordLynx, OpenVPN, IKEv2/IPsec, and more, and a double VPN feature, NordVPN is one of the best VPNs on the market in terms of security, privacy, and anonymity.

3. Surfshark

Surfshark is an overall excellent VPN with servers across a hundred countries in the world.

It offers all top-notch security and privacy features and encryption protocols that keep you protected from any kind of cybercrime. It also has a smart DNS to easily bypass geo-restrictions of hundreds of websites and OTTs.

It is known for allowing unlimited simultaneous connections through a single account, which makes it an ideal choice for people torrenting on multiple devices, and it also offers unlimited bandwidth to its users, which is a necessity when torrenting.

Do Seedboxes have built-in VPNs?

Yes, but not all of them.

Some Seedboxes claim to have a “one-click install” VPN. However, that’s not practically possible. You don’t get a handy app that allows you to configure VPN easily. Instead, you’ll have to manually configure the protocol that most Seedboxes use, OpenVPN.

And trust me, neither is it easy to configure OpenVPN (unless you are a pro at such hectic configurations) nor are they fast enough to speed up your torrenting experience. In fact, being pretty old, OpenVPN uses a slower TUN/TAP driver, a single CPU, and has an extensive code ranging between 70,000 to 600,000 lines.

All of these make OpenVPN a slower choice for torrenting. Thus, it’s rather better to use FTPs if you are using a Seedbox or switch to a reliable VPN.

FAQ

How secure are seedboxes?

Seedboxes are pretty secure and private when it comes to torrenting.

Are seedboxes safe for torrenting?

Yes. Seedboxes are absolutely safe for torrenting.

Can I use Seedbox as a VPN?

No! Seedbox is only useful while torrenting whereas a VPN helps you bypass censorships of countries and organizations, unblock geo-blocked websites and streaming services, and access the Internet securely.

Conclusion

In the comparison of Seedbox vs VPN, a Seedbox is a better option for people uploading and downloading large files frequently whereas a VPN is for the ordinary torrenter who wants to have enhanced overall security and freedom to access geo-restricted sites.