Shared host and shared seedbox were popular server hosting methods ten years ago. Unlike the popular virtual machines nowadays, shared methods generally run a large number of users on the single physical machine, provide web control panels and non-root Linux users, and a few modern shared methods are provided by Docker.
First, let’s talk about why the shared methods will be replaced by virtual machines. The primary reason is of course security. The non-privileged users divided by Linux are safe, but improper permission management of important files may also cause security problems. At the same time, the corresponding web control panel is also prone to security problems because many of the functions it provides run with root permissions. The secondary reason is the user experience issue. In the shared methods , many users work on the same server without resource isolation, resulting in fierce resource competition and unsmooth access experience. Another possible reason is the advancement of technology. Today’s virtualization technology has very low performance loss due to its close cooperation with hardware, and there are a large number of mature open source tools. Naturally, there is no need to choose the shared methods with more restrictions and a lower degree of open source.
Next, let’s discuss why I still bought a shared seedbox when there are so many excellent virtual machine services to choose from. The most important reason is that it is cheap. It provides 6TB storage and 100TB upstream traffic at a price of 7.5EUR per month. Although it uses a weak CPU from 10 years ago and a severely competitive disk usage environment, I can accept its price.
Although the shared seedbox provides an out-of-the-box environment, the versions of those software are limited. In order to unify the environment, I am accustomed to manual deployment. Here are some commands for deployment.
mkdir /home/tong/qb
mkdir /home/tong/qb/profile
wget -O /home/tong/qb/qbit https://github.com/userdocs/qbittorrent-nox-static/releases/download/release-4.5.5_v1.2.19/x86_64-qbittorrent-nox
chmod +x /home/tong/qb/qbit
pip3 install --user supervisor
cat << EOF > /home/tong/qb/supervisord.conf
[supervisord]
logfile = /home/tong/qb/supervisord.log
pidfile = /home/tong/qb/supervisord.pid
[program:myprogram]
command=/home/tong/qb/qbit -d
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stdout_logfile=/home/tong/qb/myprogram.log
stderr_logfile=/home/tong/qb/myprogram_err.log
EOF
/home/tong/.local/bin/supervisord -c /home/tong/qb/supervisord.conf
chmod -R 750 .
#Updating the default password will cause a bug
#htpasswd /home/tong/.lighttpd/.htpasswd tong
The operation is not complicated. It is equivalent to operating a Linux host without root privileges. The core is to control the reading and writing of the software to ensure that they always read and write directories to which they have permissions.