A lot of it has to do with the number of peers actively seeding, of course, but some torrent sites tend to be slower in general.

Download Speeds – this is another factor that can vary greatly, not just from one torrent site to another but also from one file to another, even on the same site.

This criterion will differ from one torrent file to another and even from one day to the next, but I wanted to highlight it regardless.

Number of Seeders – seeders are the peers helping share the content, so the more of them there are, the better.

Monthly Traffic – the more people using a torrent site, especially over an extended period, the more likely it is to have a large and varied library of quality content.

Of course, if you’re looking for very niche content, then a more niche torrent site might be better for you… but as a general rule, the bigger, the better.

Library Size and Variety – the larger and more varied a torrent site’s library, the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.

These can be used to access the content hosted by the site if the main domain gets blocked by your government or ISP, making them especially important for users in countries where torrent sites are geo-blocked.

Proxy/Mirror Links – relating to both resilience and reliability, though not to the site’s age, is whether a torrent site has any proxy or mirror links.

Just don’t get lulled into a false sense of security by the site’s age: none of them are immune to malpractice!

Torrent sites infected with malware and viruses tend to get abandoned by users pretty quickly.

Age (Reliability) – on a related note, the longer a site has been around, the more reliable it’s likely to be.

So the older a site is, the more resilient it is against take-downs.

Age (Resilience) – torrenting sites are a favorite target of governments, thanks to copyright laws.

Obviously, a torrent site needs to work for it to be a good torrent site, let alone one of the best (and therefore worthy of appearing on this list).īut there are a lot of other criteria to consider too: When making and updating this list, I sit down and ask myself the above question.

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