Too bad because they were good for a long time.
I'm thinking of moving to protonvpn.
There is an issue for torrents with so few peers that no one is connectable, and therefore there is no one to hole-punch for everyone else.
Fuck, even some technically illiterate people I know do this to watch various shows.
I am pretty sure the sheer quantity of VPN ads on YT are also good evidence that they work and people are signing up. It wouldn't make sense to scale up a marketing approach to those levels unless earlier, smaller campaigns had positive returns.
[0] It's worth calling out explicitly the crazy lengths people will go to to both (a) find a free stream of a sports match; and (b) find a way to watch a match when they're travelling and can't access whatever service they usually watch it on.
This means having no port-forwarding shouldn't be much of an issue on private trackers (because most people have it to improve their ability to seed) but on public trackers some torrents might not download.
Port forwarding works and you can get a raw wireguard config to dockerize it.
For general use in e.g. open hotspots I still use mullvad/mozilla vpn as I trust them more. (And can pay cashfor mullvad)
If you just want to grab the latest blockbuster it's no problem no.
I've never thought of getting a seedbox, i always thought the amount of storage required would be prohibitively expensive for a VPS. Also, I'd still want to use a VPN so the VPS provider isn't the only protection layer.
Personally, I do it because of the "Netflix effect". Movies and series don't exist if they're not on Netflix (or your chosen streaming platform). And with my kids growing up, I want them to see the good shows and movies I grew up with just as they share the shows they enjoy now with me. I can comfortably say that 99.9% of that media is never offered on Netflix.
Screw Netflix, it's been captured.
Some ppl on these sites seed over 500 TB
But to answer your question, for 25TB I've seen packages that cost 20euro, which is pretty much the same as what Netflix premium charges in the US.
Trust me, I looked at the page of my provider just now and that's what they offer.
Comparison: https://seedboxgui.de/seedbox/
Their reasoning is "they will be able to focus their resources where they can make a difference". Whatever that means.
It works much better and more reliabily as a site-to-site VPN on my router for some reason.
I'm not sure if this can be done without the app or not.
When did this happen? I was still able to use it within the last couple of weeks, whenever I last tried it.