[EDIT 23 August 2009] Seedbox Hosting have completely turned my perception of their customer care around. Although it took a little time (which they have blamed on some technical errors)… they have now set me up as I originally wanted, and have refunded my first months access. They seem to have taken my concerns to heart and have apparently started to resolve (if not already) the problems that I had with the sign-up and provisioning process.

I look forward now to spending a few months using their service and seeing how things go. I hope that the initial problems I had are now all in the past, and that I can just enjoy their well reviewed services. [END EDIT]

For some time now, I have been using a seedbox to download my torrents. I have done this for several reasons, primarily security and speed.

It’s also exceptionally convenient to not have to have my link at home being constantly barraged by inbound and outbound connections, just so I can keep up to date with the latest fedora ISO images.

What I have come to learn (the hard way) is that there are many players in the SeedBox market… and quite a number of them are hopeless. My first provider was good, and very responsive to customer service issues. However, they had serious bandwidth issues, that they assure are being dealt with – but for that reason, and their refusal to automatically bill (I had to manually pay each month) I moved to another provider…

SeedboxHosting.com… quite possibly one of the worst online companies that I have had to deal with in recent years. filesharefreak.com reviewed them mid last year, and ranked them among the best (#1 in fact). It seems however that with success has come a lack of care for customers.

On their home page, SeeboxHosting.com proudly tout their “Instant Activation”. It turns out that “Instant” and “about 14 hours” seem to be the same thing to them. I guess, it is all relative… but in my opinion – a little misleading.

Then there is their advertised list of three supported platforms, for which you will get the choice when you create your account… as long as you choose wTorrent.

Finally the “support” system. Suffice to say – it is non-existent. I have raised a Paypal dispute, to which there has been no response in two whole days (48 hours) and my support ticket is also yet to be appropriately dealt with in the same amount of time.

I am going to throw some money at another provider, and see how that plays out… Because I am somewhat safe in the knowledge that I will ultimately be able to recover any money I spent with SeedboxHosting.com, it will just take a long time.