Internet connection problem is driving me crazy. Help.
 

For whatever reason, my connection seems to drag ass when I try to direct download from a site, IE mediafire or megaupload. When I download a torrent, I can fly up to 900kb/s no problem, but if I'm trying for an album off mediafire, I'm lucky to get above 30kb/s. Happens in both Chrome and Firefox. I've tried with multiple links, sites, and files. Always seems to be the same.

I've tried resetting my router and modem, and it nothing changed. I would think it's browser-specific, but like I said, it's happening in Chrome and Firefox, and even IE. I've tried over both a wired and wireless connection, no difference. Streaming sites seem to work just fine. It's been this way for probably a month now, and it seems to be getting worse. I've tried clearing the caches in each browser, and that's also been useless. I have to figure the problem is somewhere on my computer, but I dunno what.

So yeah. No clue what's up. For the love of God, help.

I can think of two things.

Firewall needs exception or you need to open a port.

Firewall exceptions are all set. And everything was working fine even without the exceptions. I could try opening a port, but everything used to be working fine just the way it's set now, and anyways I plugged in directly to the modem and had the same problem.

Won't be firewalls or ports, they're direct download sites.

Sounds to me like your ISP may have joined the "war on piracy" and slowed traffic to these sites. Sounds a bit bizarre that they would do this and not torrents though, unless you've clicked the option to use encrypted traffic.

Heh. I suspect Comcast is doing this to the Pirate Bay, because I can load like 50 pages at once, but a search on TPB can take hours to return.

DNS change may help. Try this to go on Google's DNS

1. Go the Control Panel.
2. Click Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and click Change adapter settings.
3. Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
   • To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, right-click Local Area Connection, and click Properties.
   • To change the settings for a wireless connection, right-click Wireless Network Connection, and click Properties.
   If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
4. Select the Networking tab. Under This connection uses the following items, select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and then click Properties.
5. Click Advanced and select the DNS tab. If there are any DNS server IP addresses listed there, write them down for future reference, and remove them from this window.
6. Click OK.
7. Select Use the following DNS server addresses. If there are any IP addresses listed in the Preferred DNS server or Alternate DNS server, write them down for future reference.
8. Replace those addresses with the IP addresses of the Google DNS servers:
   • For IPv4: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4.
9. Restart the connection you selected in step 3.

That might just be The Pirate Bay, their servers are constantly shagged from traffic and attacks. It's a pain in the arse.

I've never had this kind of problem with them so routinely and uniformly.

Not saying they always work, but they go down for me less than TPWW.

Tried the DNS thing. No change. No idea what is going on. If I use an ethernet cable, some stuff works better, but mediafire and the like stay the same. I called my ISP (Cogeco), and the guy said everything looked fine on their end. He said he'd reset the modem and if that didn't work, get a new modem. So he reset it. Now my router is not working at all. Can't get a connection at all. The modem still works, direct downloads are still slow. Torrents still fast as fuck.

Can it be my router, even though I'm still getting shit speeds? My ISP just upgraded it's services, gave all packages faster speed/more bandwith. I dunno if they started using a new protocol or something. I am thoroughly bamboozled.

It's like this on every single file hosting site? 4shared, filesonic, hotfile, megashares, fileserve, etc or just megaupload and mediafire?

I haven't tried every one, but every one I have tried have been slow. The weird thing is, I went and downloaded some older files from Megaupload, and shit was lightning quick. Anything recent though, and it seems to crawl.

I know this is going to sound stupid, but I am going to ask anyways.

Are you sure these downloads have seeds (I mean from torrent places) As I know I have mistakenly tried to download something with no seeds before.

Also, what add-ons do you have?

What. These are not torrents I'm talking about. Direct downloads from filesharing sites. Torrents work just fine.
AdBlock, Avast Webrep, Fast youtube search, FB photo zoom, Silver Bird for Chrome. Adblock, webrep, download status bar, image zoom, personas, session manager for Firefox. I've tried disabling all extensions and nothing has changed. And all of these extensions I've had long before I started getting these slow speeds.

Could be that the newer files are on slower/shittier servers.