My home internet does not fit the high bandwidth category—this place has the crappiest internet I’ve had in years. I always start a little slow on a private tracker, using freeleech opportunities to build a library until there is enough content to sustain the ratio on its own. Even though I’m on a bad internet connection now, I was able to break the 1-1 ratio on a new site recently by just using freeleech to build a base seeding library of popular content.

The torrenting part of my server could be easily recreated with an old laptop, an ethernet cord, and an external drive. Sure, there is some upfront cost, but you can make it pretty cheap if you want it to be, and it will work for essentially the whole life of the hardware. No need to update much, unlike a gaming machine or work computer.

In my opinion, “seedbox” refers to a paid service for torrenting that is hooked up to a gigabit connection. That doesn’t reflect my home box that can’t break 1mb/s up, but simply has enough content to always be providing a trickle stream of data that adds up over time. I have noticed no issues with reduced bandwidth since it is connected via Ethernet and not WiFi—my router handles everything just fine.

I recently used my girlfriend’s 10 year old iMac to set up a torrent system for her, and it works. She also has crappy internet, but since I set it up to be connectable, she still gets ratio.

The biggest factor in keeping a ratio is port forwarding and using a VPN in case your ISP throttles torrent traffic. I already use a VPN for other things, so there was no additional cost there.

I promise, the idea that you need a powerful machine or stellar internet connection is simply not true—if you are properly connectable and have popular content, you will build credit. Download a bunch of freeleech stuff when the opportunity arises and then watch that for a month with no new downloading, and you will return to the torrent site to find a nice little buffer waiting for you.