Although BitTorrent itself is all about sharing, remote download services like this can come in handy when one’s Internet connection is throttled or when regular downloads are simply going too slow. Contrary to standard BitTorrent transfers, these services are also keeping one’s personal details private.

True to the holiday spirit, LeechMonster decided to give away 1000 free accounts to curious TorrentFreak readers, and another 5000 3GB upgrades to those who sign up for a regular account. Those who are interested can try LeechMonster out with the promo code 436fa13667ba, which will add 1GB to the free account.

Although LeechMonster does what it promises, it is still in the Beta phase and users have to add torrent files through KickassTorrents. For the beta it is also limited to file from the TV, Movies and Music categories. In a later stage LeechMonster will partner with other torrent sites as well as accept more torrents, TorrentFreak was told.

Adding a torrent to LeechMonster is easy. On KickassTorrents you simply click the green “secure direct download” button and then it will be automatically added to the download queue. Once the download is finished users can download the files directly to their computer, at full speed.

LeechMonster is not the only torrent download service out there of course, there are a few dozen. One of the main competitors is Put.io which also offers a limited number of limited free trials at the moment, up to 100GB storage and bandwidth.

Even at Christmas, not everything is positive though. The major downside to direct download services is that they are not free. LeechMonster and others charge a monthly or yearly fee to pay their bandwidth bills, which is not something every BitTorrent user may appreciate.

And what about sharing, you might ask?

Direct download services like this always raise suspicion of leeching off the BitTorrent community, but we are assured that all the torrents are shared for a while according to proper BitTorrent etiquette. Also, the way these services generally operate a particular torrent is only downloaded once. When another person requests the same torrent later it will simply be downloaded from the central servers.

Happy leeching, and Merry Christmas.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.