>Ensure a Good Share Ratio Without Wasting Extra Bandwidth
An important part of BitTorrent is sharing, and a good member of the BitTorrent community gives as much as he/she takes. In fact, many sites, especially private trackers, keep a close eye on your share ratio and may even ban you if you don’t keep your ratio above a certain point (i.e., if you are a “leecher”). This isn’t as widespread as it used to be, but it does still happen. We are in total agreement of the whole share-and-share-alike attitude, but once we have shared an equal part of what we have downloaded, we don’t want to waste too much extra bandwidth on that torrent.
Rather than constantly checking your torrent ratios, you can remove them as soon as they cross the 1.0 barrier. Just go to the Queuing section of uTorrent and find the “Seed While” section. There you can set a goal ratio for a file you’re sharing, then set how much bandwidth uTorrent will allocate to the torrent once that goal is reached (in the screenshot, for example, uTorrent will stop sharing the file after its share ratio reaches 150%). If you prefer, you can just limit the upload rate when uTorrent reaches its goal by checking the corresponding box at the bottom of the window.
In Transmission, head to the Transfers pane of the preferences and click on the Management tab. Check the box that says Stop Seeding at Ratio and set the ratio to whatever you want, like 1.50 (meaning when your ratio reaches 150%).
3.External Solutions for Hiding Your Traffic
We won’t go into too much detail here, but we thought some of the more extreme measures deserved mentions in this guide. Here are a few other ways to really keep others out of your business.
>Use a VPN
While there are a number of great solutions to hide your identity while downloading, using a VPN is usually a very cheap and popular way to do so. You can use any number of VPN services like ItsHidden, which will route your traffic through another server, keeping your IP address away from prying eyes.
Download: ItsHidden
>Set up a Proxy
One of the other popular methods of obscuring yourself is using a proxy, which works similarly to a VPN. You could roll your own SSH proxy or use something a bit easier like BTGuard. You very well may see a speed drop when using this method, though, so if speed is more important to you than privacy, this may not be the best route to go.
If you have any favorite settings we didn’t cover, share them with us in the comments. 🙂
