[laatedaa?]

UPDATE***: Now you can buy hosting from http://sciclonehost.com They now recently offer TorrentFlux hosting which is a torrent client on a server so it uses the server’s resources/100mbit internet to download. I am a client of there’s and I have to say, this is quality stuff. (shh…they even allow copyrighted material…)

These days, nothing worries an internet service provider more than peer-to-peer file trading. Depending on where you live, P2P can account for between 50 and 75% of broadband internet traffic. We mostly have the popularity of BitTorrent to thank for this crazy amount of data going to and fro.

This amount of traffic can raise the ISPs daily costs of delivering service, cause congestion either in your neighborhood or on the ISP’s network, and force the ISP to buy increased bandwidth capacity.

But if you’ve been paying close attention to your BitTorrent transfers lately (or if you’ve simply been reading the news) you’ll notice that ISPs have begun to take drastic measures to slow that flood of data currently clogging up their pipes.

Even though many of them deny it, most ISPs actively engage in traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling, connection denial or some such tactic to keep the amount of bandwidth consumed by high traffic applications on their networks to a minimum. While this does often ensure better performance for everyone in the neighborhood, it can mean painfully slow transfer speeds for those dabbling in P2P — legit or not.

While there are valid arguments for and against shaping, we’re not here to debate. We just want the fastest BitTorrent transfers possible.

So how do we get our speeds back?!

There’s been a fair number of articles online regarding protocol encryption and whatever so I’m not going to touch those topics anymore. What I’ll do is introduce 2 BT clients that have worked (at least for me) exceptionally well considering my ISP actively shapes P2P traffic. In the follow up to this article, I’ll touch up on the non-free solutions to get around traffic shaping.

Deluge

Previously know as gTorrent (probably because it was the first native GNOME torrent client ever), this is probably one of the most actively developed torrent clients around today.

The good thing about this client is it supports full stream encryption (the entire stream is encrypted with RC4). This means that its highly unlikely that your ISP will shape it unless you enable legacy connections - I recommend to turn this off as if the ISP detects unencrypted connections, there’s a higher chance that it will start shaping you.

You can download this client by clicking the links below

* Windows
* Linux

Some notes: Deluge for windows seems to be buggy for some users, experiencing random crashes or the listening port suddenly stops ‘listening’. This is probably because its an alpha port and isn’t too stable yet. You could try virtualization and load linux inside VMWare and run Deluge in it.

Xunlei

Xunlei is a Chinese p2p software using http ports This software takes a different approach from deluge by faking the header and signature of IE and Firefox. In other words, downloading from other Xunlei users can be considered as HTTP downloads are thus not shaped. I’m sure they do some other magic in the background but as this is not open source software, I haven’t had the opportunity to actually look into it, bar some rudimentary packet sniffing.

It even has its own search engine at http://www.gougou.com (use google translate to figure out what’s being said, if you can’t read Chinese). The cool thing about gougou is that all the links from there use the http protocol so if you find what you want there, be prepared to be amazed by the speed!

Pros

* Good download speeds
* Has its own indexed search engine.

Cons

* Lots of Ads (Suspected spyware)
* Not fully translated to english. ( There is an unofficial translation project going on though, you can check it out here )

Download links

Original Client - http://down.sandai.net/Thunder5.7.3.389.exe
DDR Client (Modified) - http://www.mediafire.com/?0jmzqxz0jmc

Notes:

I’d definitely prefer the DDR client. It has the spyware removed as well as some of the more usless options and some tweaks to boot!
Conclusion

Take your pick on which one to use, they each have their strong points, but personally I’d take Xunlei over Deluge for stability issues AND I’m Chinese which means their search engine has tonnes of stuff I want