They’re guaranteed to be permanently online as much as such a thing can be for $20/month or whatever. They don’t shut it down if you’re not using it, if that’s what you’re asking but they do occasionally come down for upgrades/migrations/incidents/etc. I’d ballpark most providers in the 99% uptime range.

Some provide root, some don’t. Last I checked, you’ll pay more for root because most of the servers are physical so you have to rent a whole server basically.

The servers are typically IO bound on the NIC so they aren’t super picky about what you do with CPU and memory. They won’t let you run a crypto miner or do heavily parallel transcoding, but if you want to chuck a Python+SQLite web app on there I doubt they’d care.

Depends on the seedbox most will give you root/ssh, others just give you a APi/web interface to a managed torrent client which can be convenient. Check r/seedboxes

thanks! this sounds interesting

> Are these guaranteed to be permanently online?

Well no, can't really guarantee that.

> Do they come with root access if we end up renting one?

Some do, some don't. If you want root you'll need to rent a dedicated one and avoid shared plans.