Hi guys

I wanted to ask for advise regarding the ideal setup for making sure your ISP isn't tracking your every move without sacrificing too much of your bandwidth...

Before i started using seedboxes I've had a NAS that was connecting via a VPN (Express VPN to be precise) and i used the built in torrent client to download everything. It worked pretty well, never had any issues but download never went about 2,5MB and upload, well was always below 1MB/s so had trouble keeping ratios up...

Then i switched to seedboxes but i'm still quite new to this field so could use some advise on the planning out the most secure workflow to keep my privacy protected mostly from my ISP without going back to the 2mb/s now.

I'm not using VPN on my main machine now because again it slows down the net quite a bit, I connect to the seedboxes via CuteFTP which keeps my downloads close to the max of my ISP's connection. Question here: can your ISP monitor what you are downloading via FTP clients, or that ability is limited to http / https methods ?

The only problem that i see with my current setup that i visit the torrent sites without a VPN this way, so my IP is visible and the ISP can probably see my site visit history however if i put the VPN on then my FTP downloads will suffer...
Can someone provide a good solution for this ? sorry for being such a noob here, again still starting out with this setup but i want to make it work without getting an interesting letter from the ISP... obviously since i have the seedboxes my data traffic had increased as well...

any advise or pointers to guides on the topic would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Hi @SSJPegasus,

Seem like you have some serious considerations about your ratio rather than your safety.

First, you must exchange this something for another something. So I'd recommend you exchange your speed for your safety. "Safety" in some countries is less important than speed because those countries are somehow torrent friendly, the ISP and the government only care about what you do if your actions are against them, they don't have time to care about the rest even copyrights rules are declared, sound funny? But safety is always first, sure.

I use Bitvise SSH to down/up and manage everything from my boxes. Bitvise SSH works perfectly. FileZilla is also a good choice. Both are free. You can also use other software too.

I use seedboxes to build my ratios, but You will don't have to care about your ratio on any site if you can upload something; uploading is one kind of sharing which inspires the torrent world. Many sites have a download policy for new torrents or large torrents. It's super easy to survive and keep a perfect ratio on Eastern originated trackers which have so many free download torrents. Even on a tracker where it's hard to build a good ratio, you can survive easily, long term seeding with your NAS will save you a lot. On the other hands, a ratio above 1.00 is enough on every tracker. With enough buffer, you can download anything that you want
If you can't build a good ratio on a tracker, don't try RSS-ing all the torrents. It's no use trying to RSS those torrents just to build a ratio without any improvement. When RSS-ing, you will also have to spend your time to delete unnecessary content, RSS-ing, then, it's not a good choice. If you don't RSS but your ratio is bad, you have many free torrents to build your ratio, just keep seeding.

Basically, your ISP can see the IP of the address that you visit, but it can not catch the content of the connection if the connection is secure. When you use a VPN, your ISP will see the destination that you're connected to, that is your VPN providers. VPN providers secure their connections, so it's safe. After connected to VPN, you will be out of your ISP's eyes. Even your VPN connections are catched, 3nd party will likely not be able to decrypt your secure content because the content is encrypted by another party. It's always best to browse sites via their secure connections. VPNs with high speed will not slow down your connection much, that slowdown also depends on your overseas speed if VPN provider's IP is in another country. Oh yes, I would recommend you to use VPN of a foreign provider, that could increase your safety.

Have your choice at your own

P/S: Trackers will make special considerations to long-term seeders rather than users with high buffer and a good ratio.