Here's what I do to maintain my healthy ratio (currently at 5.070):
- Make sure you have at least 1 torrent seeding 24/7 even if it's not uploading anything, because you gain 0.5 seed bonus points for every hour the system registers you as a seeder. It's not much, but it slowly builds up over time.
- Keep a healthy stack of seed bonus points on the side so you can use them to buy upload GB's if your ratio ever drops too low.
- Ideally you want more to have more torrents seeding all the time. How many depends on your available disk space, upload bandwidth etc. I would target 20-100 for most users.
- Prefer seeding larger torrents if you have the disk space for it, so your torrent client doesn't get bogged down with seeding hundreds of small ones. A single downloader for a 300GB torrent requires the equivalent of 600 downloaders for 500MB torrents. They may be fewer and further between but they more than make up for it in sheer bandwidth.
On the other hand, smaller torrents tend to get higher ratios (since they get downloaded more often), so they can be preferable if you are trying to get the most upload bandwidth out of limited diskspace (or limited download capacity). - Search for freeleech torrents periodically (every day if you can). Sort them by freeleech start time. Your prime targets are the ones with the most recent freeleech start time, as those will not have a lot of seeders yet and most of the interested downloaders have yet to come across them.
- After a suitable torrent has finished downloading, leave it seeding for a few weeks/months. Evaluate your seeding torrents every few weeks/months. Look at their ratios and total upload bandwidth relative to the time they were added to your torrent client. Keep the good ones, remove the bad ones to avoid bogging down your torrent client.
- Do not change which torrents you are seeding often. Stick with the ones that worked even if they haven't seen any traffic recently. Most torrents automatically settle down to a small number of seeders over time. You want to pick your horses and stick with them (rather than constantly dropping them and finding new ones) for two reasons:
1: It benefits you to become one of those few consistent seeders for a given torrent, even if it's not very active anymore. Other seeders will jump ship over time, so when a downloader does come by you will be able to provide a significant amount of the bandwidth (rather than just 1-2% on a more active torrent).
2: It benefits the ecosystem and avoids torrents dying, which benefits us all. We can't all seed 10k+ torrents. Each of us is technically forced to pick a handful to seed, so switching around all the time just causes interference with other seeders. - In a crunch, you can always recommence seeding on a torrent you've already deleted from your client (so long as you still have the files intact). You can redownload the .torrent file if necessary, then pause it immediately, move your existing files into place, and choose "recheck files" in your torrent client to get it back up to 100% right away and go back to seeding.
I hope that helps.
