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Download Speed Limitations

65 Comments


Don't think that we're happy to do this but...

We've capped the speed for non-donors to 50 KB/s if you are downloading from browser directly and 400-500 KB/s if using any download managers. The reason for this restriction is to keep our bandwidth usage to what we can afford and get donations for.

Donors don't get any restriction at all.

1- How to alleviate this restriction?

Obviously, all you have to do is donate. The minimum amount that you can donate is $10. If you're curious to know what's the difference between donating $10 or, let's say, $50? You may look at this page for more details on donation and sustaining a donor status.

2- Why 50 KBps on browser downloads and 400-500 KBps on download managers?

To understand the reason, you have to understand how downloading a file on HTTP/HTTPS protocol works. HTTP protocol has the capability to make multiple connections to the same file and download it in chunks. For example, instead of downloading a 100 MB file using 1 connection, HTTP protocol will make 4 simultaneous connections, for example, and each connection will download a distinct chunk of 25 MB. These simultaneous connections help in downloading a file faster given that your internet connection has enough bandwidth to allocate to simultaneous connections. Browsers, even though they've matured so much, still don't download file in multiple connections. Meanwhile, download managers can be configured to use more than one connection to download files. The limitation imposed here is 50 Kbps per connection and 6-8 connections per download. Hence, 50 KBps if you download via browser and 400-500 KBps if you use a download manager that is configured to make multiple connections while downloading.

3- Why the figure of 50 KBps or 400-500 KBps?

Because it cuts down our bandwidth usage to half. Most of the leeching comes from non-donors which is not surprising because we get around 5000 unique users daily and we don't expect 2500 of them (50%) will be donors. In fact, the ratio of donors is below 1%. However, it wasn't making sense that while they pay for the servers, free-leechers get the most of the advantage, especially when leeching is steadily increasing every month which resulted into increased cost every month. Cutting down bandwidth to half seems reasonable enough for free-leechers to have a little bit of luxury while it saves us from going bankrupt.

4- How all this will effect torrents on the site?

Torrenting depends upon the peers. If there are peers that can seed, then you can get download speed as high as the rate of seeding. However, we try to keep at least one webseed connected to our servers which ensures that even if there are 0 seeders, people can download content from our server. Since webseed is a single HTTP connection, it means you can get only 500 KBps (not same as HTTP limit) from our server. We can't control what other peers seed to you and nor that makes sense as it's up to seeders how they use their internet bandwidth. In short, if there are 0 seeders and you have a working webseed connected to our servers, then you'll get 500 Kbps. If you are lucky to have peers that can seed to you, that will just add to your speed.
That is why torrenting is so amazing. You can share the bandwidth without putting any toll to a centralized server. Unfortunately, people here are vicious beasts. Most of them don't care about seeding back and get back to their own greedy world after downloading what they want.

5- Other ways to implement restriction(s)?

Unfortunately, we can't implement limitations like other private torrenting sites do. They put on a unique user hash inside each .torrent file downloaded by a user and can track the exact bandwidth a user has been downloading. Similarly, using the hash they can track what is the seeding ratio of a user and ban them accordingly. This can't be easily translated to direct downloading paradigm. Though, I have some solutions in mind, they require time and commitment which becomes difficult when you have a full time job to attend to. Similarly, who wouldn't love to implement a strict tracking system for torrenting? Yet I have little to no time to dedicate.
In short, the easiest and efficient of all the solutions foreseeable right now is limiting download speed which is exactly we have implemented.

6- Putting torrents on public sites like Nyaa to distribute the bandwidth usage or to increase seeders?

First, putting the torrents on public sites will not distribute the bandwidth usage. If ever, we remove webseeds from the .torrent files when we upload them to public sites and hence the seeding / leeching is completely up to the connected peers. But this introduces a problem of seeding from our side for a while so that other users can download it completely and then may be able to seed future peers. Though some of the staff has done this past, it's not scaleable and doable for entire storage present on our server.
Second, public / private torrent sites don't like us. In fact, Nyaa and some other sites have us blacklisted. If you come across our torrents on some other sites, that's an anomaly and can be removed anytime. In short, putting our torrents on public sites is not a solution but an extra work with unpredictable outcome. As for sites disliking us, we are a re-encode site that provides content in small size. Apparently, similar re-encode sites have done enough damage by putting bad-quality content to make a bad reputation all around the online market about re-encodes and torrenting sites don't like re-encodes for the very same reason.

7- What happens to exceeding donations? What about revenue from ads?

We get a total of $30 / month from all our DDL ads. This little revenue goes into paying for server and included in the donation progress bar shown on the site. As for donations coming after we've got enough for the month already, they go to the money pool for next month and if that's filled up, donations go to the pool for month after that and so on. There has never been a moment since the start of this site where we took money for ourselves. However, there have been many occasions when we had to pay from our pocket so that we don't go under.
Moving on with the topic, for the month of Jan 2020, with donations coming throughout the month we had enough to cover the cost and still have some left for the month of Feb 2020. When Feb starts, we'll update the donation bar with appropriate percentage so you know how much we have already covered and how much still needs to cover the donation pool for the month.

8- What are future plans? Any chance of lifting the restriction or getting better servers?

The problem we have with our current providers is not about servers but with the way they charge for bandwidth usage after first 30TB. If anything, our servers had a great year of 2019. No disk corruption, no DoS and no inability to perform because of any bottleneck. Still, the money we are conceding right now for our bandwidth is so high that we might be better off by switching to a different provider. However, switching your provider can prove risky. For example, what if we switch and start experiencing HDD / disk failures every now and then? We're considering to find a better provider that can tackle our bandwidth usage in a more cost-effective plan. Even then, there are things to consider for future. We'll inform y'all if we ever change our providers etc.

 

65 thoughts on “Download Speed Limitations”

    1. Copy paste from donation page:

      The donator status has the following duration:
      $2 amounts for a week of time, and minimum is $10:
      – For example you’ll get 5 weeks for donating $10 (which is the minimum), while donating $50 is already enough for a half year !
      – When you donate $40 or more, we can give you an extra 30% duration as gift! This means, that instead of 20 weeks in this case, you’ll get 26 weeks, and so on!
      – We’ve tried to set up so that they’re fair, and that they will be enough for us to pay our servers!
      – If we have trouble in the future, these rates may be raised, however for people who’ve donated already their subscription length will be never reduced!

       

  4. I knew it was coming, but not that I am too bothered as at the moment due to problems on the international lines locally even the 50kb/s speed is a pipe dream.
    Sadly I can’t deal with any of the donation services.

     

    1. Same here. Not a fan of forced donations. It’s not donation anymore but a subscription fee (for higher download speed, that is).

      Looking at it positively, before, I had to either play online games or focus entirely on downloading. Now… I can download WHILE playing online games.

      Either way, Hi10 does a great job and I can see why they need this step. Each to their own

       

    1. That would never work, it is far from our vision to force people to donate to have access to the content, the only reason we need donations is because of the server itself and nothing more, no one is making money out of this to fill their pockets.
      Certainly something I would never agree with, and I think the rest of the staff is of the same mindset, you can feel safe about that.

       

  9. Well good move to give extra speed for pay user. So what benefit donate if the person internet speed even slower then the free user “Download Manager” like my speed average 1Mbps (100KB/s)?

     

    1. Donors currently get the following advantages.

      1. No ads.
      2. No restriction on download speed.
      3. Prioritize the request for a show.

        Depends upon the content availability

       

  10. well fair enough for me.it’s help me to reduce mobile data usage too with this limitation
    but why not reduce the speed to 1MB/s and 5-10 files download/day ?it’s more effective….i guess

     

    1. Copy/paste from earlier comment (Kicha Karry – January 21, 2020 AT 9:27 AM):

      The donator status has the following duration:
      $2 amounts for a week of time, and minimum is $10:
      – For example you’ll get 5 weeks for donating $10 (which is the minimum), while donating $50 is already enough for a half year !
      – When you donate $40 or more, we can give you an extra 30% duration as gift! This means, that instead of 20 weeks in this case, you’ll get 26 weeks, and so on!
      – We’ve tried to set up so that they’re fair, and that they will be enough for us to pay our servers!
      – If we have trouble in the future, these rates may be raised, however for people who’ve donated already their subscription length will be never reduced!

      So yes, capped. It’s now a premium service, subscription fee. $10 for a ~month. Given you donated before, it’s likely expired by now… Other case would be if you donated like $50 two months ago which should be for over six months time of premium. But given that was before the new rules, it’s a whole new Schrödinger’s cat in a box waiting to be opened. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

       

    2. That status of donor remains till a timeline and depends upon how much you donate. After that timeline, donor status is reverted back to normal. If you have a status of donor, you will experience no limitations.

       

  14. Maybe “Click, Show Ad, DDL” doesn’t help pay the bills enough for their usage?

    If “public leeching” is a problem, maybe _forcing_ torrents is a way to go?? Use torrents AND SEED if possible for the shows that have them. When it works, it’s great having at least 1 primary seed for a torrent. That’s one of the best things about Hi10 — the files are always _available_ at one place or the other. (Of course not everyone can use torrents, but how to promote it where possible?)

    I always try to use torrents — they’re interruptible, self-checking, and help spread the load slightly. [Current ratio: 100 on a 1.3G 2 day old file, 60 on a 870M one using a seedbox on a public torrent. I sourced at least 5+ Hi10 random seasons in the last month, but moving directories around 0s out all the numbers. Don’t want to be noticed, just helping out.]

    Not all seasons/shows have torrent files (set up hassle), but even some that do don’t seem to be seeding even _using_ the FAQ Web-seed bit. (Maybe I botched it?? Multiple times though, and also had it work for a few. Dunno.)

    Or maybe “changeable torrent contents” where there’s just one “ID” with changing contents. (SyncThing, Resilio are torrents in all but name.) You can even specify WHICH files to load/skip, and these are both new file download and share.

     

  16. I did not know this matter until today so yerterday I download one anime series from here and on IDM my speed was 400KB to 500KB. At that time I thought some server issue so I put 3 files in the queue to download in one time and I got total 1.2MB to 1.5MB.
    I think you fix this matter also “only 400KB to 500KB” on the queue matter

     

  17. I hope you dont interpret this message as me accusing you of anything. I’m a huge fan of your site and appreciate everything that you have done for the community so far and I’m really looking forward to what lies ahead.

    But I really would suggest that you be completely open about what happens to the donations and what they are used for. Checking the donation tracker right now only says that the total cost of the server is 195$ per month. Beneath you can see that 100% of that amount were met for that month.

    But what happens to the additional money now? I dont think it is far fetched to assume that the goal for this month was overshot by dozens if not hundreds of dollars. So what now? Bigger servers? Faster Download speeds? What are the plans for the future? Will you upgrade to “bigger and faster” servers? Can you upgrade to have more bandwith? Will it be possible to remove the download limitations in the future once the goal for the month is met?

    Again, I dont intend to accuse anyone of anything. I’m thankful for all you’ve done so far. I just feel that more transparency would help a lot.

     

    1. Additional donation will be considered as donations for next month. when the donation is used to pay server fee they will update the donation tracker to zero percent if no additional donation is made in previous month, if there was additional donation in previous month new donation tracker will reflect that.

       

    2. If they get more donations than required every month they will remove the speed cap even for free users and will provide even better servers.

      I think you are new here. Hi10 team has already done this many times and everyone is familiar with the way admins making the rules.

      Even though I’m not a donor (sorry admins $ are not my country standard) I stand with their decision and thank them for their work.

       

  19. Actually I don’t mind the 50 kBps limit per connection and I’ll continue to watch hi10 encodes which are the best I’ve ever seen. But I’ve got a couple of questions though.

    Now I’am able to a download at 500kBps per file in my DM. I’m assuming it uses 10 threads. I usually download in bulk and I don’t really see the speed loss. With 10 concurrent downloads I’m getting 5 MBps download speed.

    Question 1 – Is my download method considered an abuse of the current system?(May be resulting in IP ban.. Bit of stretch though)
    Question 2 – If so, will there be a cap on max number of connections that can be made from an IP anytime soon?

     

    1. Edit – I just noticed, multiple connections took a toll on my CPU usage. It’s skyrocketing LOL. So yeah, I see the downside of speed limit now. Ha.

       

  20. Your donations reached 100% yet you still do this?
    You alluded that you would only resort to doing things like this if the donation didn’t reach 100%.
    Not transparent in the very least…

     

    1. We might be reaching 100% of our donations based on a value that used to be closer to the amount of bandwidth being consumed until October. However, we’ve been exceeding well in excess of 100Tb+ since November resulting in 70-110 euros worth of overage charges and it won’t change the fact that our users will continue to use high amounts of data unless something is done to limit the damage since our provider won’t allow us to go past 30tb for free data. Meaning that even if we hit what would be classified as 100% based on our estimates, the amount owing could still exceed what we have since we don’t know how much will be accumulated each month data wise.

      Yes, that was the plan initially if donations were too low, but we can’t ignore the amount of money that’s being bled in excess each month to keep users happy with our work or one of us gets stuck with the bill for the month and has to pay it out of their pocket in the amount of 300 euros. This month’s bill.

      To put it into better perspective, only 0.003% of our users have donation status. 16 of which were added this month to help out with the recent hit whom we’re eternally grateful for aiding us.

       

  21. all’s good, true that i’m not a donator, but i mostly get torrents with batches, and try to seed as long as i can… i’ve been keeping Death Note torrent active for like 1.5 month now, and got like 0.689 share ratio, still 0 peer 0 seed… at least i try to repay in that kind of behaviour

     

    1. The problem with seeding is that we have too many torrents to seed, so even if you commit the effort to seed them, it is still not enough, chances are almost no one will download from you, unless you picked to seed something that was recently released, and even for that, give it a couple of weeks/months and you will lose heart, not seeing anyone ddl it from you.
      It is inevitable since we are constantly putting new content, the post becomes “old” pretty fast. While it is not realistic to ask for people to keep seeding for years, or go and pick old stuff and seed (then watch no one ddl it from you), it would be something if almost everyone that ddl via batch would at least seed that said torrent for at least a month or so, if they did, the first few months, there would surely always be someone there helping out until no one expresses any interest for the torrent itself again for a good while and it falls in limbo.

       

      1. what you’re saying is true, i mean, DN is anime from 2008-9 if i remember correctly, who would want 10y anime, barely anyone, im even amazed i got 0.689 share ratio… and as new content gets old pretty fast, it will have high demand for like 2 weeks? if ppl seed even for this long it would greatly lessen your bandwith.
        but there’s 1 problem here, i barely anytime see torrent files besides batches, mostly http download, dunno if these are hidden in rss (haven’t even checked there), but it could lessen initial demand… still it would make more work for all of you to put up set of torrents for each release.
        about donating, i’ll try to get some stable funds for that, unfortunately living in poland isn’t too profitable and having to give away half of what you earned doing your bussiness so country can give it to unemplyed + after changing currency is /5 when it comes to GBP and prices aren’t even that far apart

         

      2. MAY I SUGGEST an experiment?

        Take 4 shows, 3 current and still running, 1 new-ish but finished.
        A) EPs have torrent files ONLY (yes, a pain to setup) and backed by the Hi10 server.
        B) EPs are shared only by Resilio (or syncthing or whatever.) These have a single unchanging “torrent” but the shared directory slowly changes.
        C) EPs are backed by the Hi10 server but speed restricted (the current config)
        D) A Complete Series is shared by Resilio per B (you’ve already got Torrent stats)
        E) Hell, if you want, raw FTP hosting for a few files on my server.

        You should already have #s for EPs vs registered/free members. I’m looking for “low-hanging fruit” here. This is kinda forcing torrents and anyone who wants to seed to help, can. If torrents help reduce the load for new month-old files, let’s do that. After that month, it becomes available normally.

        Now: **I** can temporarily host the weird ones (Resilio’s preinstalled on my seedbox, the others I’ll have to fight to install — no root, but a SSH interface with 3T space and 30TB bandwidth/month) and after a while we’ll check the bandwidth / usage for things.

        OR, if we’re blowing 100TB/month, I can host (temporarily, I’m not saying sticky-move to my server) say the newest file and I’ll take the initial brunt, while older 2 week-old files move back to where they normally are.

        I pumped out 22T a few months ago for months, and then 37T for one month. (Oops. THAT one got hit with a big slowdown for awhile.) And that’s the stats from ruTorrent, which I think loses some numbers occasionally.

        Good? Bad? Indifferent? What’cha all think? I was planning to host-torrent shows I’ve already got (sorting them all and copying to “The Cloud”) but haven’t done so yet. (STILL uploading. and then trying to declutter and sort. Ugh.)

         

        1. Let’s keep this in backlog and reconsider if we don’t find an alternative in a month or so.

           

  22. It is funny that people want everything free.

    Dear friends,
    Hi10 members spend their time (as i think most valuable thing is this) for encoding, writing post and many other things to keep this site alive.

    At least don’t let them to pay the bills also!

    I am from a country with low amount of currency to dollar so i am sorry that i can’t donate.

    Also here there is no easy way to transfer money to international!

    Although, if i was not unemployed i certainly get donated what i could but unfortunately i’m unemployed yet.

    I can’t understand people in rich countries why can’t donate a few dollars a month?!

    It is money of a cheap launch for you!!!

     

  23. It really is okay this way. People have to adapt or go elsewhere.
    How can they be more open and transparent. I think some cannot comprehend what Hi10 Anime wrote. If English is not your first language then translate it. Otherwise ask an adult.
    It is still free, so how can anyone complain?

     

  24. I’m a long time leecher for this site, finally I got a decent job and the first thing I remember is donating to this amazing site and I did donate just today, staff responded to my email in short 2 hours.
    May all hi10anime staff and families peace health and happiness.
    Thank you for amazing years after years.

     

  27. Heya, why can’t one simply donate via Patreon? 🙂
    Is their lowest commission rate with 5% in your estimate already way too high?
    They do have an API (https://docs.patreon.com/#introduction) so you surely can also connect to read the current/monthly payout ratio?

    Anyways, if that would be the case I’ld have done so long ago 🙂
    Thanks for your feedback in advance!

    Greetings 🙂

     

    1. In addition to PayPal, we also support donations from credit / debit card which is the easiest way. If you’re interested, you may contact us via email.

       

  28. This sucks but I can’t complain. I’d donate but I live in a third world country and the currency exchange forces me to pay an amazing amount in my native currency for $10 that I simply can’t afford.

     

  29. Guys, you should know that not all members are from wealthy first world countries, I’m and many more like me are from a really poor and shity country. cap the speed with our shit turtle-speed internet is torture for us.
    I will support you guys with everything, I even whitelisting this site from the time I discovered it (and fall in love with), but guys like me don’t even have the Luxury of credit/debit card.

    Anyway goodluck for you guys

     

  30. Glad it’s working well for you guys. I really want to donate, but I don’t have any means to do so… (no cc or anything, not in US too). Watching you guys struggle for a long time and sometimes (if not often), the encoders even have to chunk in some of their pocket money to keep the show going, is kinda harsh. Jan and Feb reached 100% really quickly, and I hope this will continue for a long while now. good luck guys.

     

  31. Seeding with the torrents for as long as possible. I eve set up a dedicated machine for this.

    Fingers crossed my isp doesn’t get pissed 😛

     

    1. Works fine for me. You need to set jdownloader to download a link with multiple connections.
      Settings>Max. Chunks per Download>increase it to around 8.

       

    1. Then the users should start downloading less, right? This is no charity, we are thankful for those that support us, but those that don’t have to realize they are part of a vast growing majority, and these are methods applied so that everyone sooner or later at least can get its thing ddled, would you have preferred we made ddl restrict to donators?
      You surely don’t expect staff to pay from their own pockets to keep everyone with access to high-speed downloads, I mean you all had it in the past, but in the past, they were not so many people using and going beyond the permitted traffic quota we are allowed per month with every support we get from our generous donators.

      I think people coming with such claims, even after understanding the situation (which is explained above in more detail) should look themselves in the mirror and release how much they already have and be grateful.

      The good news is that at least for anything I release in the first weeks I can guarantee good upload speeds since I m seeding them myself, which is WHY I reccomend people to go for my batches when I release them and not for DDL.

       

      1. Free filehosts are only going to cause more problems for us in the end since they control the account instead of us ownership wise. So if they see enough TOS claims, there goes the account along the data and time spent maintaining it. All in all, it’s not worth the time spent jumping through rabbit holes, hoping that things will stay alright when all that’s needed is a strong gust of wind or someone in a bad mood to make everything come crashing down.

         

        1. What about MEGA cloud drive with restricted access from your discord server. I don’t even know what i just thought. Is that possible?

           

        2. Won’t a combo work, file host + server. But then again some of you are already using Mega. There was someone at minitheatre.org who wrote a program to download episodes from Mega without sending an actual link. (S)He sent some string of characters and the program parsed them into links without revealing the links. It was a good method.

           

  37. I’m so sad, when i download on hi10anime.com, i just got 12kbps, it is so shame. can you fix it to minimal 500 kbps ?

    When in other anime website, i got full bandwith download at 2,5 MBps. it so awesome.

     

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