Why are my downloads suddenly so slow?

This week I started hearing from many customers that their download speed has suddenly dropped to around 30 KiB/s, well below what's acceptable. I spent some time investigating this and I have come to the conclusion that this is happening due to factors out of my control. I have some theories as to what's happening:

• Some internet providers have started noticing the amount of bandwidth that pixeldrain uses and are throttling connections to my servers to save on transit costs.
• Some of the international cables connecting Europe and Asia may be overloaded or damaged. This means transit providers have to throttle some connections to make place for others. As pixeldrain uses the most dirt-cheap internet that's available it's probably the first to get throttled.

To really figure out what's going on I need some more information. Please fill in this short survey to help me get to the bottom of it: https://forms.gle/sdhUstwzLva4t7W69

The issue seems most prevalent in Asia and Oceania. I do not have servers in those regions so all the traffic is served from Europe and the USA. This means that files downloaded there always have to traverse an ocean. Traffic that crosses a long distance becomes expensive simply due to the number of routers it has to pass through.

Though it is really scummy, and illegal in some places, throttling international connections can save an ISP quite a lot of money. We know by now that most corporations have no problem with bending over customers to save some coin.

The only solution seems to be for me to install some servers in Asia. I already have my eyes on a good offer in Singapore, but I can't really afford it currently. If the subscriptions keep growing like they are now I should have enough budget available in about a month.

It's good to remember that pixeldrain does not throttle connections at all unless you have exceeded your daily download limit. If you have not exceeded your download limit and your downloads are slow then upgrading to Pro will not help. The problem is with your ISP. Contacting your ISP's support might help in some cases.

To test your speed to pixeldrain's servers you can try this link: https://pixeldrain.com/api/misc/speedtest. It will download a 1 GB file at the fastest speed possible.

Thanks,

Wim.