When I first heard about Fetch.io I was really excited, I thought finally I could collate all my downloads through one interface, and I could speed up my bit-torrent downloads by downloading my torrents through fetch.io and using blazing http to download from fetch. I was so excited I jumped on an subscribed to one month the moment it launched.
Sadly fetch.io as a hit and miss affair.
Some torrents I tried to download including AC/DC albums and Raiders of the lost ark just failed misreably giving me a (22) error (pictured above). So far from the 5 torrent files I tried, only 1 succeeded. That’s a pretty low amount, and this wasn’t a matter of corrupted torrent files, because using my locally installed u-torrent to download worked out just fine. Raiders of the lost ark was a prime example, I downloaded the torrent from isohunt.com and then uploaded to fetch.io and got a (22) error. Then I used u-torrent to download it and it worked just fine, (although it was a bit slow).
I will say though that when it eventually succeeded, it did so remarkably fast. My download of “Leon the Professional” was done in a matter of minutes, this was a 1.4GB file in less than 10 minutes. Amazing. Plus I never saw my http download speeds move any faster. Fetch.io weren’t kidding when they said the had fast infrastructure.
What’s not so Amazing is that bandwidth is charged for the bit-torrent download (1.4GB) and the http download (another 1.4GB), so when fetch.io offers you 10GB of storage and 20GB of Bandwidth, what that effectively means is that you can download 10GB of files just once. Once you’ve downloaded 10GB and transferred them to your local machine…you’ll be out of Bandwidth. In short, if you wish to download a 1GB file , you’ll need to use 2GB of bandwidth….that’s bad.
Plus, my personal pet-peeve is that my http download of the 1.4GB file really didn’t work out so well. It was fast (no doubt), but I had to attempt to download the file 2-3 times before it eventually succeeded. When it did, I found out I was charged for additional bandwidth I did not use (obviously I was charged for failed downloads as well), and now I’ve used up 4GB of my 20GB bandwidth allocation….for downloading just one 1.4GB file.
Overall, the idea is great, the user-interface isn’t. The execution is poor and the whole system just isn’t as stable as I would have liked. I’m not renewing my fetch.io account till they sort this out.
Fetch.io is definitely NOT recommended.