Downloading files on the internet via torrents and cloud services like Mega, Rapidgator, Usenet etc can be quite exhausting in that downloads fail sometimes because the internet connection is glitchy or free accounts do not support resume downloads and as such data is wasted each time a download is interrupted.
These issues pushed me to subscribe to cloud torrent services and they’ve served me quite well over the years though they come at a fee. I’ve been using FileStream for like 2 -3 years now and it’s been amazing. Lately I saw an offer for a lifetime subscription to Offcloud so I decided to grab it.
What follows in continuation is my honest views on the good and bad with each service.
Table of Contents
Pricing
OffCloud offers a monthly and yearly all inclusive plan @ $9.99 and $59.99 respectively. For these prices, you get access to every feature on the service. A free plan is on offer but it only allows you to download 3 files per month.
FileStream on the other hand offers monthly and yearly plans with 3 tiers; Bronze, Silver and Gold starting from $3.50/month for monthly plans and $2.45/month for yearly plans. Each tier comes with limits which you can view here. FileStream offers a free plan too but I find it UTTERLY USELESS.
Winner: I’m going with FileStream here as it allows one to test the services for just $3.50 before considering upgrading to higher plans with more benefits. Paying Offcloud’s $9.99/month to test a service properly is a lot to me. They do offer refunds though.
Monthly Bandwidth and Cloud Storage
OffCloud offers 50GB of storage space and unlimited monthly traffic on its plans while FileStream offers storage space ranging from 200GB to 1TB depending on your subscription plan. Like OffCloud, you get unlimited bandwidth.
While FileStream has a file storage limit time ranging from 3 to 20 days, after which your downloaded files will be automatically deleted, all file stored to your 50GB OffCloud storage will stay put until you cancel your subscription.
Winner: Definitely OffCloud
File Size
OffCloud doesn’t put a limit on how heavy a file can be downloaded to their servers but FileStream does ranging from 200MB on the free plan to 100GB on their Gold plan.
Winner: OffCloud
Download Speed
Now this is where I have a HUGE problem with OffCloud. Compared to what I’m used to on FileStream, OffCloud can be annoyingly slow in fetching data. A 3GB torrent can be uploaded to both services at the same time and within 2 minutes max, FileStream has successfully downloaded the file to their server while OffCloud is still STRUGGLING to start the download.
I raised this issue with customer support at OffCloud and this is what they had to say;
Thank you for your inquiry and we apologize for the inconvenience. It seems that the torrents were not seeded well. Probably, they were downloaded and cached by Filestream before, that’s why they completed so quickly by that service. Please make sure that your torrents are seeded enough well for better experience with Offcloud.
I don’t know how true this is and all I can say is that even with well seeded torrents, FileStream beats it hands down. If you’re going to use OffCloud, just load the download and walk away. You can set your account settings to alert you via email once downloads are complete.
UPDATE 24 February 2019: Looks like OffCloud’s customer care rep might be right with regards to the download speed issue. When I load torrents from a particular website, they load very slowly but when I load the same torrent file from a different site, the download is super fast.
UPDATE 22 March 2019: Torrent download aside, direct download links are also annoyingly slow to complete on OffCloud and they seem to have somewhat frequent downtimes.
Winner: I’ll let FileStream have this one as its download speed isn’t dependent on the source of the torrent. FileStream gives me zero headache.
File Hosting Service Support
OffCloud supports like 20 File Hosting Services which include Filefactory, Mega, Openload, Rapidgator, Turbobit, Uploaded, Usenet and Zippyshare and 9 streaming sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo and RedTube. Downloads from these services are sometimes limited to some quota per day and on days when the services are down, Offcloud lets you know. There are plans to add more file hosting services to the service.
FileStream on the other hand isn’t so transparent about what file hosting services it supports. It supports 3 services on its Silver Plan and 7 on its Gold Plan. When I sent them an email regarding this, I got this;
On Silver you are have – TurboBit, DepositFiles, rapidgator, mediafire, 4shared
But none of them are stable due to the complicated structure of the service provision. So we can not guarantee 100% time of it’s work.
Winner: OffCloud
Parallel Downloads
Depending on your plan you can have 2 to 10 active downloads on FileStream but with OffCloud there seems to be no limit. By parallel downloads, I’m referring to torrents or file services hosted files being actively downloaded unto FileStream or OffCloud servers.
Winner: OffCloud
File Organization
FileStream allows you to move files around into folders and download such folders as a zip file. This helps a lot in keeping the server neat and organized. Unfortunately downloading such folders as a zip file sometimes creates issues as when your download is complete, you might be faced with an issue of file corruption when unzipping said download. This happened to me twice and I quit downloading zip files on the service.
OffCloud doesn’t offer any file organization for now.
Winner: FileStream
Conclusion
Best Experience: FileStream.
I have to admit the download speed mess with OffCloud was so annoying and depressing that I almost requested for a refund but after a few days, I just decided to let it go. A lifetime subscription is less to worry about compared to a yearly subscription.
If you’ve got other questions about these services, don’t hesistate to leave a comment.
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