Pulsed Media vs Bytesized

Pulsed Media runs its M-series seedboxes on RAID5 arrays, from €6.99 a month for 2 TB. Bytesized's own plan table lists every Appbox tier, from €5 to €96 a month, as "No redundancy". A RAID5 array survives one failed drive without data loss; non-redundant storage does not. Pulsed Media's V-series and SSD plans are RAID0 and have no redundancy either.

This page is written by Pulsed Media, a competitor of Bytesized. Bytesized figures come from Bytesized's own pages as read on 6 October 2026 (listed under Sources). Both providers list prices excluding VAT.

Bytesized Hosting B.V. is a Dutch company that has run managed app hosting since 2009, with servers in Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands. Its strengths are a one-click catalog of 96+ apps, GPU transcoding and an AI assistant that runs a media library through chat. Pulsed Media (Magna Capax Finland Oy, operating since 2010) sells RAID5 storage from datacenter infrastructure it owns and operates in Finland.

Quick comparison

Feature	Pulsed Media	Bytesized
Company	Magna Capax Finland Oy, Finland	Bytesized Hosting B.V., Netherlands
Operating since	2010	2009
Own network	Yes, AS203003	Yes, AS202786
Datacenter infrastructure	Owns and operates its own, in Finland	Not stated on the pages read
Server locations	Finland	Luxembourg, France, Netherlands
Storage redundancy	RAID5 on M-series, RAID10 on Dragon-R; RAID0 on V-series and SSD plans	"No redundancy" on every Appbox and GPU Appbox tier
Port speed	1, 10 or 20 Gbps, by plan	10 Gbit
Upload traffic	Monthly allowance per plan, measured over a rolling 30 days; past it, internet upload continues at 100 Mbps (M-series)	Appbox: "unmetered", under a fair-use rule of at most 3 times the average user on the same plan. AI Appbox: 3 to 20 TB a month
SSD plans	Yes, from €1.99 for 230 GiB	HDD on every plan listed
One-click apps	Install Media Stack button on the dashboard: 7 apps, needs at least 1024 MiB of account memory	96+ apps
Your own containers	Rootless Docker; HTTPS through a lighttpd proxy fragment the customer writes; no automatic per-container subdomain	Rootless Docker; every container gets its own free HTTPS address. Terms of Service: applications "not installed by default" need express staff authorization
GPU transcoding	No, on shared plans	GPU Appbox, from €25 a month for 1 TB
AI	Väinämöinen, an autonomous AI sysadmin for operations and support tickets; Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI pre-installed, customer's own API key	bytesized·one, a chat assistant that runs the media library (AI Appbox)
Support	Ticket system; community Discord	Ticket system, "usually available 20 hours a day", no guaranteed answering time (Terms of Service); Discord
Money-back	14 days, initial order only. Excludes dedicated servers, domains and support/management services. Crypto payments are refunded only as account credit. Pulsed Media reserves the right to a €10 processing fee and a €10 office fee per refund	7 days, pro-rata. Crypto payments are not refunded. Dedicated server setup fees are not refunded. Prepaid amounts are not refunded after 60 days
Trustpilot (6 October 2026)	4.3, "Excellent", 71 reviews	4.9, 301 reviews
Published server performance	Live per-plan figures, hourly, plus a JSON feed	None found on the pages read

Price per TB

Prices as of 6 October 2026, monthly billing, excluding VAT. Pulsed Media prices are from its public product data feed; Bytesized prices are from its Appbox page. Pulsed Media counts 1 TB as 910 GiB of usable space, as its plan pages state. Bytesized lists storage in GB without defining the unit.

Plan	Storage	Redundancy	Port	Upload	€/month	€/TB as listed
Pulsed Media M1000 S	2 TB	RAID5	1 Gbps	30,000 GiB per 30 days, then 100 Mbps	6.99	3.50
Pulsed Media M10G S	2 TB	RAID5	10 Gbps	10,000 GiB per 30 days, then 100 Mbps	8.99	4.50
Pulsed Media M10G L	8 TB	RAID5	10 Gbps	50,000 GiB per 30 days, then 100 Mbps	19.99	2.50
Pulsed Media M10G XL	12 TB	RAID5	10 Gbps	80,000 GiB per 30 days, then 100 Mbps	24.99	2.08
Bytesized Appbox Lite	500 GB	None	10 Gbit	Unmetered, 3× fair-use rule	5	10.00
Bytesized Appbox +3	3,000 GB	None	10 Gbit	Unmetered, 3× fair-use rule	14	4.67
Bytesized Appbox +9	9,000 GB	None	10 Gbit	Unmetered, 3× fair-use rule	48	5.33
Bytesized Appbox +12	12,000 GB	None	10 Gbit	Unmetered, 3× fair-use rule	64	5.33

The closest pair is M10G S (10 Gbps port, 10,000 GiB upload per 30 days, then 100 Mbps) at €4.50 per TB against Appbox +3 (10 Gbit, upload unmetered under the 3× fair-use rule) at €4.67 per TB. Counted in GiB, M10G S is €4.94 per 1,000 GiB, and Appbox +3 is €4.67 or €5.01 depending on whether Bytesized's GB means GiB or decimal GB, so that pair is level. Bytesized marks the 3 TB Appbox as "Limited availability". The 1 Gbps M1000 S (30,000 GiB upload per 30 days, then 100 Mbps) and the 8 TB M10G L (10 Gbps upload, 50,000 GiB per 30 days, then 100 Mbps) are cheaper per TB than any Appbox tier under either reading, and both are RAID5. At 12 TB the gap is widest: M10G XL is €2.08 per TB on RAID5, Appbox +12 is €5.33 per TB with no redundancy. On Bytesized's regular Appbox there is no fixed monthly upload figure; the fair-use rule applies instead.

Usernames in public certificate logs

Let's Encrypt submits every certificate it issues to Certificate Transparency logs (Let's Encrypt: CT logs). The logs are public and append-only, so anyone can search them and an entry stays for good (RFC 6962, section 1). A certificate whose name contains a username therefore publishes that username.

Bytesized's 2017 position and its current addresses

In March 2017 Bytesized explained why it chose one wildcard certificate per server rather than free Let's Encrypt certificates that list customer addresses. Such a certificate "would expose all 100 usernames"; "We value privacy and exposing our members to the world seemed like a bad idea"; and wildcards had "the added benefit of not leaking usernames" (Our journey into TLS/SSL; archived copy, 5 April 2017). In March 2018 it moved those per-server wildcards to Let's Encrypt (Bytesized news, 2018).

Its Docker guide, published in August 2026, now gives each container an address of the form myapp.USERNAME.SERVER.bysh.me "with a real HTTPS certificate" (Bytesized Docker guide). A wildcard certificate covers only one label of a name (RFC 9525, section 6.3), so each such account needs a certificate naming *.USERNAME.SERVER.bysh.me. Certificates still valid on 7 October 2026 named 800 distinct addresses of that per-account form under bysh.me; the logs also keep every earlier certificate. That is the exposure the 2017 post set out to avoid. Bytesized's privacy policy, marked "Last Edited on 28-05-2018", lists the username with the purpose "To create and manage server accounts" and does not mention certificates or Certificate Transparency (Bytesized privacy policy).

The certificate a server shows for an unknown name

When a web server receives an HTTPS connection for a name it does not host, it presents the certificate of its first or default site (Apache: name-based virtual hosts; nginx: configuring HTTPS servers). On a shared server that site should carry the server's own certificate; nginx also has a setting that refuses such connections outright (ssl_reject_handshake). If the default site is a customer's, anyone who connects with a made-up name receives that customer's certificate, and the username in it, without searching any log. On 7 October 2026 Pulsed Media connected to four Bytesized shared servers with a made-up name. Three returned the server's own certificate. One returned a certificate in the per-account form described above. This page does not name that server or the certificate.

Wildcard certificates need a DNS write key

Let's Encrypt, which issued the per-account certificates above, grants wildcard certificates only through the DNS-01 challenge, so the system that requests them must be able to write records in the domain's DNS (Let's Encrypt: challenge types). That key is powerful. Depending on how it is scoped, whoever holds it can change where any name in the domain points, or prove control of any name in the domain and obtain trusted certificates for it, including a customer's address. Let's Encrypt warns that "putting your full DNS API credentials on your web server significantly increases the impact if that web server is hacked", and recommends narrowly scoped credentials or validation from a separate server. Two further controls exist: a DNS provider can restrict such a key to the challenge records (AWS: Route 53 record conditions), and a CAA record can limit which certificate authorities and accounts may issue for the domain (Let's Encrypt: CAA). On 7 October 2026 bysh.me was hosted on Amazon Route 53 and published no CAA record. Where Bytesized keeps its key and how it is scoped is not public.

How Pulsed Media issues certificates

Pulsed Media's servers do not use DNS-01, so they hold no DNS write key for certificates. Each server's certificate is issued over HTTP-01 for the server's own name. Everyday access uses paths such as https://SERVER.pulsedmedia.com/user-USERNAME/, so no username appears in certificate logs. A connection with an unknown name gets the server's own certificate. The exception is the optional HTTPS for a customer's public web folder, which the customer requests with a command over SSH on servers updated since 31 July 2026: since the PMSS update of 7 October 2026 its certificate covers only the account's username-free permalink. USERNAME.SERVER.pulsedmedia.com is added only when the customer asks for it and types a confirmation that the username will be published in the logs. A server that has not yet installed that update still lists both names. The Permalinks on PMSS page states this.

What Bytesized's comparison page says about Pulsed Media, checked

Bytesized publishes a page comparing its AppBox with Pulsed Media, labelled "Last updated: August 2026". The left column quotes that page as it read on 6 October 2026. The other two columns give what a reader can check and where.

Bytesized's row about Pulsed Media	What can be checked	Where
Built-in AI Assistant: "✗ Not available"	Pulsed Media runs Väinämöinen, an autonomous AI sysadmin that handles support tickets and server administration. It is not a media library assistant like bytesized·one. Customers can also run Claude Code, Codex CLI or Gemini CLI, pre-installed system-wide, with their own API key. Bytesized's own guide to AI seedboxes, checked by its author on 27 September 2026, describes both.	Väinämöinen (AI sysadmin); AI CLI tools
Docker: "Rootless Docker, no HTTPS reverse proxy"	Partly right. Rootless Docker is available, and a container can be served over HTTPS through a short lighttpd proxy fragment the customer writes. What Pulsed Media lacks is Bytesized's automatic HTTPS subdomain for each container.	Rootless DOCKER: serving a container over HTTPS; Lighttpd Custom Configuration
Setup Time: "Manual"; Pre-Configured Apps: "Limited app automation"	The dashboard's welcome tab has an Install Media Stack button. It installs Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, Autobrr and Cloudplow, and sets a generated login on each web app before the proxy goes live. The dashboard marks any app without a login as "Exposed". The account needs at least 1024 MiB of memory. Seven apps is a far smaller catalog than Bytesized's 96+.	Install Media Stack
Founded: "Long-running (Finland)", against "2009 (15+ years)" for Bytesized	Pulsed Media has operated since 2010.	Pulsed Media company page (linked in the introduction)
Trustpilot Rating: "Mixed (reviewer reports)", against "4.9/5 (301 reviews)" for Bytesized	On 6 October 2026 Trustpilot showed Pulsed Media at 4.3, labelled "Excellent", from 71 reviews. Bytesized's own figure is correct.	Trustpilot: Pulsed Media
Real-World Disk I/O: "Reviewers report inconsistency"; also "Reviewer reports of overselling"	Bytesized's page cites no specific review. Of the 68 Pulsed Media reviews visible on Trustpilot on 6 October 2026, none uses the word "oversell"; five describe speeds that dropped or fell short of the plan, and two of those say the problem was then fixed. Disk speed on any shared server varies with load, which is why Pulsed Media publishes live server figures per plan, refreshed hourly: users per server, disk response time and time spent waiting on disk. Each figure is the average and the median across the plan's servers, so it shows the typical server, not the worst one.	Live server performance; Pulsed Media Public Data Feeds
Support Model: "Reviewers report slow/limited support"	Bytesized's page cites no specific review. Pulsed Media's Trustpilot page has both praise and complaints about support.	Trustpilot: Pulsed Media
Plex / Jellyfin / Emby: "✓" for Pulsed Media	Only Jellyfin is part of Pulsed Media's media stack installer. Plex and Emby are not.	Install Media Stack
Network: "Plan dependent"	Correct: 1, 10 or 20 Gbps depending on the plan.	Seedbox Feature Comparison
GPU Transcoding: "✗ Not offered"; 4K Streaming: "CPU-only"	Correct for shared seedbox plans.	Plan pages
Server Locations: "Finland"	Correct.	Pulsed Media Datacenters

Where Pulsed Media wins

Redundant storage. RAID5 on every M-series plan, from €6.99 for 2 TB, and RAID10 on Dragon-R. Bytesized lists every Appbox and GPU Appbox tier as "No redundancy".
Price per TB. The 1 Gbps M1000 S (30,000 GiB upload per 30 days, then 100 Mbps) and the M10G plans from 4 TB (10 Gbps upload, 20,000 GiB per 30 days and up, then 100 Mbps) cost less per TB than any Appbox tier, whose upload is unmetered under the 3× fair-use rule. Details in the price table.
Own datacenter infrastructure. Pulsed Media owns and operates its own datacenter infrastructure in Finland, the only seedbox provider it knows of that does, and runs its own network (AS203003). See Pulsed Media Datacenters.
SSD plans. From €1.99 a month for 230 GiB on a 1 Gbps port, with 4,400 GiB of upload a month.
20 Gbps tier. Dragon-R plans on RAID10, from €17.99 for 3 TB.
Money-back window. 14 days on the initial order against Bytesized's 7 days pro-rata; the limits on both sides are in the comparison table above.
Published performance data. Live per-plan server figures and a JSON feed, refreshed hourly.
Your own software. Rootless Docker is set up per account and documented on this wiki. Bytesized's Terms of Service (clause 9) say applications not installed by default need express authorization from a staff member, while its homepage offers rootless Docker "for anything you run yourself".
Open-source platform. The seedbox platform, PMSS, is public under GPL v3.

Summary

Both providers run rootless Docker, sell 10 Gbps shared plans and publish their prices. The main differences, with sources in the tables above:

Pulsed Media: RAID-protected storage on M-series and Dragon-R, a lower price per TB on M-series plans, its own datacenter infrastructure and network (AS203003), published live server figures, and an open-source platform (PMSS, GPL v3).
Bytesized: a larger one-click catalog (96+ apps), an automatic HTTPS address for each container, GPU transcoding on the GPU Appbox, a chat-based library assistant on the AI Appbox, and servers in three EU countries.

Pulsed Media's M10G seedboxes start at €8.99 a month for 2 TB on RAID5 with a 10 Gbps port and 10,000 GiB of monthly upload, with a 14-day money-back guarantee on the first order (refund terms).

Sources

Bytesized pages on bytesized-hosting.com, read 6 October 2026: the AppBox vs PulsedMedia comparison page ("Last updated: August 2026"), Appbox, AI Appbox, GPU Appbox, plans, homepage, Refund Policy, Terms of Service, and the guide "AI seedboxes in 2026" (checked by its author on 27 September 2026).
Trustpilot profiles of both companies, read 6 October 2026.
Pulsed Media prices: the public product data feed, generated 6 October 2026, 08:00 UTC; see Pulsed Media Public Data Feeds.
Certificate sources, read 7 October 2026: Bytesized's posts "Our journey into TLS/SSL" (2017, live and in the Internet Archive) and its 2018 wildcard update, the Docker guide (published 27 August 2026) and the privacy policy; Certificate Transparency search results for bysh.me (certificates valid that day); RFC 6962 and RFC 9525; Let's Encrypt documentation on CT logs, challenge types and CAA; Apache and nginx documentation; AWS Route 53 documentation; DNS lookups of bysh.me (name servers, CAA); one HTTPS connection with a made-up name to each of four Bytesized shared servers.
Network registrations: RIPE records for AS203003 (Magna Capax Finland Oy) and AS202786 (Bytesized Hosting B.V.), checked 6 October 2026.

Prices and plans change. Check each provider's current pages before buying.