Protecting the interest of our customers and ensuring the stability of the service have been key principles for IVPN since starting our operations more than ten years ago. To keep delivering on these promises, we have made the decision to gradually phase out the port forwarding feature from the IVPN Pro plan.
The problem with seedboxes is that you’re severely limited on storage space. If more VPN providers remove port forwarding and more people move to seedboxes, we’ll see every old torrent die off as people are only going go seed the newest content. You definitely need a balance of seedboxes and people like me with a 6TB HDD used solely for permaseeding on my home connection for both fast downloads and torrent longevity.
I’ve already made a comment ITT but I’d like to agree with you here and add on -
Not only this, but a lot of seedbox providers either restrict or outright disallow the use of public trackers on their services, both for DMCA-avoidance and also for fair usage policy compliance since slots are often shared (depending on provider & plan). Dedicated servers/slots that can mitigate the latter reason are more expensive and probably out of budget for a lot of torrenters (including myself).
I can see an increasing shift in seedbox usage if more VPNs remove port-forwarding (which I can also see happening - look at how fast IVPN removed it after Mullvad. If you’d allow me a doomer moment, we could be looking at zero good options for VPNs with port forwarding by the end of the year or next). What I can’t predict is how badly or how quickly losing these options will actually affect public tracker usage/torrent availability. I’m not sure if there are any numbers out there estimating how many people utilize VPNs and port forwarding with public torrents versus those who do not.
Regardless, these VPN changes aren’t good news for us… between this and RARBG going down, it’s been a disappointing last few months. I have found my home in a few private trackers and am focusing my efforts there to upload content that I care about, but that content will not reach the masses like the public torrents I soon may not be able to seed efficiently can.
At least the upside is that generally content still available will be faster to download with people using seedboxes