ISPs and network administrators often block access to P2P file sharing services like torrents; especially when you’re accessing the Internet from restricted zones (schools, colleges or offices). Even if P2P protocol is unblocked, it’s more likely that you won’t have a torrent client installed on your organization’s computer. Besides network restrictions, sometimes you may also want to download torrent content at full speed without having to worry about lower seeds and peers.
Download torrent without client
Wouldn’t it be great if you could download torrent content directly, just as any other HTTP download? Fortunately, there are some cloud services that allow you to cache torrents directly in the cloud. Once the torrent content is available in cloud storage, you can save them to your computer or mobile device using any suitable web browser or download manager. We have come up with a list of top 7 cloud services that allow users to download torrents directly over HTTP.
Zbigz is a cloud storage service that supports caching of torrents in the cloud. Instead of waiting for enough seeds to boost up your download speed over P2P network, you may add the torrent link on Zbigz and it will download the torrent to their cloud storage. Once the torrent content has been fully cached, you can download it from the Zbigz servers. And yes, all Zbigs downloads have resume capability. Their servers are fast and offer high speed torrent torrent caching, though depending on the type of account, and the speed of connection, your download speed may vary accordingly.
Zbigz offers three types of file storage services. The unregistered free version allows you to download files with resume capability. But you need to keep an active session in order to download your cached files. Besides downloading torrents, Zbigz also lets you stream audio and video torrents online. Free registered users get a personal account where they can keep track of their downloads. Both the free services offer limited storage (less than 1 GB), download speed (150 KBps), and number of simultaneous downloads (1-2). To unlock these restrictions, including a lot of other features, users should upgrade to the Premium version.
This is a dedicated service for caching torrent files in the cloud. In order to use the service, first you need to sign up via email or Facebook. A free account will allow you to download torrents of less than 512 MB size, and cached torrents will be available for 24 hours. There is also a download speed limit for free users. Paid users can store up to 30 GB of data at a time, get unlimited download speeds, and 5 days for keeping their data.
Boxopus has a traffic meter for controlling bandwidth usage. The traffic meter tells you how much bandwidth you can use to download torrents. Basically, you start off with 10 GB, but as you cache more torrents to your Boxopus account, the traffic meter comes down. Based on your subscription, your traffic will be recharged on hourly basis (50 MB/hr for free users, 250 MB/hr for paid users) up to a maximum of 10 GB.
The service uses SSL file encryption to protect the privacy of its users. It has its own private cloud storage for caching torrents, but users can also integrate their Dropbox and Google Drive accounts to transfer their torrent downloads to these services. This ensures that you get to store your torrent downloads in the cloud for unlimited time.
Free users can upgrade their accounts based on 3 subscription models – Tiny bucket ($1.49 for 7days), Big Bucket ($14.49 for 3 months) or Huge Bucket ($49.99 for 12 months). Boxopus has a free Chrome extension, and the website is optimized for mobile devices.
Put.io is another cloud storage service with dedicated BitTorrent support. It caches torrents and puts them into the users’ private storage. The service does not offer a free trial. In order to use Put.io, you need to pick a suitable subscription plan. The minimum subscription plan is $0.99 per day, which gives you up to 50 GB of storage space, 10 simultaneous torrent download slots, and a maximum seeding time of 2 days. For more information on the service, refer to its FAQ section. You might also find the details about various Put.io subscription plans helpful.
Bitport is another cloud based file storage solution with support for torrent caching. Besides torrents, you can also download other types of files and store them in your private cloud. The service is also capable of streaming video and music torrents online, along with subtitles, if available. Once files have been downloaded to your Bitport account, you can access them anywhere and from any device, be it a smartphone, a tablet or a computer.
Free users get access to 2 GB of cloud storage, with download speeds of up to 100 Mb/hour. Simultaneous downloads are not supported for free users. Premium users can get up to 250 GB of cloud storage with up to 20 slots for simultaneous downloading/caching. All Premium users get access to unlimited download speeds, and are protected with SSL encrypted connection. They also get free antivirus (NOD32) checks for each of the downloaded files.
ByteBX is another cloud storage solution, like Bitport, that provide support for torrent caching. Just upload a torrent file or paste the URL or magnet link for the torrent you want to download, and ByteBX will cache the torrent for you. The service offers three different subscription plans. For free, you get up to 2.5 GB of storage space, a maximum download speed of 100 Kb/sec and 5 day storage period. Media streaming support and simultaneous downloads are not available for free accounts. If you wish to upgrade to Premium, there are two plans available, Premium 100 (for 100 GB storage) and Premium 300 (for 300 GB storage). Both these plans offer additional features like unlimited downloading speed, archiving, media streaming, simultaneous downloads, unlimited file storage period and more.
Filestream is one of the best cloud storage services for caching files on the Internet. It offers reasonable subscription plans to ensure that you can take full advantage of the service, even if you’re a free user. In addition to caching files from popular file sharing services, you can also use the service for caching torrents. A free Filestream account gives you unlimited torrent caching, single torrent size limit of up to 1 GB, and caching from selected file sharing sites up to 5 GB per month. In addition, free users also get some extra features that you’d usually expect only premium users to have, such as infinite file storage duration, SSL encryption, user anonymity (by hiding IP address), unlimited number of torrent downloads, and more.
On the downside, free users don’t get resume support for downloading multiple files and zipped folders (though single file download resume support is available). Also free users can only experience limited downloading speed. To remove these restrictions and get some additional features and allowances, you may want to upgrade to a paid subscription plan.
Furk is basically a torrent search engine that helps you search for .torrent files across the web. But additionally, it can also fetch torrents to its own servers, from where you may download them over HTTP. The service is a bit different from other cloud based torrent fetching services, considering that it holds your downloads in an open searchable storage, where anyone can search and access them.
Apart from torrent search and caching, additional features include media streaming of files from PC, smartphone, Xbox, Playstation, etc., unlimited file storage (shared database), bandwidth limit of up to 250 GB per month, and more. Free users get a bandwidth usage of 1 GB/day or 5 GB/week, and requires an invite code for signing up. However, if you don’t have an invite, you can also sign up via Facebook. There are multiple paid subscription plans available, depending on how much bandwidth you want to use.
Download torrent with IDM
With the help of the above cloud based torrent caching solutions, you can now download torrents with Internet Download Manager (IDM). To do so, just use any of the above services to cache your preferred torrents. Once the torrents are available in the cloud, just copy the suitable download link and paste the URL in IDM as a new download. IDM will now download your torrent content from the particular cloud service.
Online torrent client – BitLet
If you have Java Runtime installed in your system and your web browser supports Java applets, you can also use BitLet to download torrents from your browser. Bitlet is a browser based Java applet that works as an online torrent client. So, if you don’t have a torrent client installed on your computer, your web browser can get the job done for you.
These were some of the alternative ways to download torrents directly without using torrent client. Did you find them useful? Did we miss any of them that are worth mentioning? Share your opinions about these services with us in the comments below. You can also email us, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to receive updates on new articles.