Torrific offers an interesting alternative to using seedboxes or downloading torrents directly to a local computer service. The free service can be used to create direct HTTP downloads of torrents. It basically works like this. The user adds a torrent file to the system. Torrific then uses its server to download the torrent, and make it available for download to the user of its service.

There are a few benefits of this, with the two most prominent ones the following: HTTP downloads are usually a lot faster than downloads from Bittorrent, and that’s true even with the added time that the downloads take before they are ready and available at Torrific.

The second advantage is that the user’s IP address does not appear in the P2P network at all. Torrific does all that, and it will be very interesting to see how they handle downloads of copyrighted media.

torrific

The download progress of each torrent that is added to the service is displayed on the user’s profile page. Having said that it should be noted that user accounts are mandatory but easy to setup and without verification whatsoever.

Torrents can either be added directly by pointing the service to a torrent url, or by using a keyword search, which makes use of a custom Google search form. It usually is faster to locate the torrent directly though, especially if the user has a few favorite sites for torrent downloads.

Email notifications can be configured, which dispatch an email whenever a torrent has been downloaded completely by the torrent downloading service.

Some torrents are available instantly, which is the case if another Torrific member already requested it and if it still resides on the servers of the torrent downloading service. The developers state that files are usually stored for a limited period of time, due to storage limitations. This currently seems to be less than a week. The oldest torrents expire first to make room for new torrent requests.

Premium accounts are available, which offer benefits like no wait time for large torrent downloads. The service is currently in alpha, and offers unlimited downloads for free users. It is likely that this is going to change over time. Everything else would simply be unreasonable, considering that the service has to pay for the bandwidth used by its users and the downloads of the torrents.

Check out Torrific if you want to give it a try.

Update: The Torrific website is no longer available. The latest version of uTorrent has made sharing a lot easier, I suggest you try it out as an alternative. You can also try the following two Torrific alternatives.

There are still some settings that are worth tweaking to make sure that the settings from your side are perfect for full speed if the torrent provides that speed. Optimize your bittorrent download speed explains not only basic settings but also advanced ones that help improve the download speed. The article not only provides the numbers but explains them and the reasoning behind. This is great. Let us take a look at the parameters:

Max Half open Tcp Connections: You probably need to apply a patch to windows xp service pack 2  because windows xp sp2 limits the number of halp open tcp connections to 10. Suggest is a number between 50 and 100.

Maximum Upload Speed: If no one seeds no one will recieve files. If everyone sets his upload speed to a minimum downloads will be slow. Set this to a reasonable level, suggested is 80%. Some sites force you to keep a good ratio if you want to download torrents from their sites, if your ratio drops below a certain level you will not be able to download at all. Suggested setting is 80% of your maximum upload speed. I´am recieving good results with 50% as well.

Maximum Download Speed: If you don´t need some bandwidth for other activities on your computer or have enough you can leave this at maximum speed. Use a lower figure if you want to do something besides downloading. (Surfing, chatting). Suggested between 80% – 100%

Maximum connected peers per torrent: I have no experience with the setting, the article suggests a figure of your upload speed * 1.3 which would mean for a speed of 50K that the maximum connected peers per torrent would be set to 50 * 1.3 = 65

Maximum Upload Slots: Suggest value is 1 + ( upload speed / 6). Means for our 50k upload speed example it would be 9.

The article offers a few more tips that might improve your speeds. Some ISPs throttle torrent traffic, two methods to avoid this would be to change the default ports that bittorrent uses and to encrypt your torrent traffic.