HDArea

Introduction

Private torrent tracking sites are growing each year. An increasing number of users are inclined towards becoming a part of an exclusive community. And the reason for that desire is because private torrent communities don’t just offer more stability, but safety and a better free indie content experience too. In addition to these basic privileges, users can make the most of active communities, rank-based presence, torrent request, and much more.

Most of the private torrent sites have a user-hierarchy which determines his/her role on the platform. It’s like a class-based competition where each user is trying to contribute to ensuring they progress to the next level. This contribution need not always be a donation, members can contribute by staying active, posting on forums, uploading torrents, seeding torrents, and participating in polls. Today, we’re reviewing one such site which has all of this and much more. This site is known as HDArea.

What is HDArea?

HDArea is a Chinese HD tracker site that launched after witnessing the success stories of HDWing and CHDBits. It’s a fairly new site that has managed to build a sizeable community within a short amount of time. There are plenty of reasons why HDArea has attracted a large number of users. These include – excellent encoding, freedom to members, interactive forums, active community, quality torrents, and overall browsing experience.

Is HDArea safe?

For a torrent site to be safe for browsing, it needs to have an SSL certificate, which HDArea does have. By using tools such as SEOQuake and MOZ, you can easily check the credibility of a website by gauging Domain Score (DS) and Trust Score (TS). Based on my research, HDArea has a domain score of 2 and a trust score of 31 which is extremely disappointing. Sure, it’s not uncommon for torrent sites to have a DS less than 15 and a TS less than 40. However, given that HDArea is more than five years old, I was expecting a domain score of at least 10.

What should you expect from HDArea?

Great Encoding System – Much of its success can be accredited to its encoding system EPiC which provides users with 720P and 1080P encodes. The usage of such an encoding system allows HDArea to offer amazing content interaction similar to sites such as PTP, AwesomeHD, and HD Torrents. Other than an amazing encoding system, HDArea also provides BluRay untouched disks, HDApad for mHD codes, and HDATV for TV. Nonetheless, the EPiC encodes are the fastest among all these HD trackers.

Forum – Forum is the lifeblood for any torrent community. Be it private or public, forums help users feel at home. At any given time, when a user is facing difficulties, he/she can visit the forum and search for answers. If they don’t find it, they can post a new query themselves. Since the HDArea community is super active, you’re likely to get an answer within 24-48 hours. There are several sections on the forum such as ‘Announcement’, ‘Complaint & Suggestion’, ‘Activity’, ‘Newbie’, ‘Technical Discussion’, ‘Request’, ‘Recruitment’, ‘Invite’, ‘Record’, ‘Audio’, and ‘Subtitle’.

Torrent Requesting – As a member of HDArea, you can upload torrent and can even request torrent as per your requirement. There’s a dedicated ‘Request Page’ where you can fill a form to request a torrent. All you need to do is add a torrent file, choose an image, provide a name, Add IMDb rating, and write a description for that file. It’s advisable to be as direct as possible so the mods don’t have any trouble understanding the requirement.

Trending Categories – HDArea is known for offering the most comprehensive free indie movie download experience. It’s not just the titles that are impressive but the way the devs have defined various categories. As you can understand by the keywords, these aren’t menus but rather the trending keywords that are searched for on the website. This makes it easier for a new member to understand what’s popular on the platform.

Active Data – HDArea similar to Ethor is quite transparent when it comes to numbers. There’s a dedicated chart wherein, you can find daily consumption of content. Based on the chart, you can understand that more than 1 TB of data is downloaded from the website each day. Other than download data, you can also find stats related to ‘Most Active Users’, ‘Top 10 Uploaders’, ‘Top 10 Seeders’, and ‘Top 10 fastest Uploaders’ among many others.

HDArea in numbers

HDArea is a mid-size community with over 15,000 registered members. It caters specifically to the Chinese audience around the world. It has about 6,000 active torrents including HD content. Maintaining a seed-to-leech ratio is quite simple on this platform because it has plenty of freeleech torrents. And thanks to the point-based bonus system, a frequent user can easily maintain a ratio of above 0.8.

As per the Alexa rankings, HDArea is ranked #62,800 which makes it amongst the top 65,000 websites on the internet. It attracts more than 140,000 users a month and an average visit on the site lasts for more than 8 minutes. An average user visits 1.83 pages before bouncing off the website. The average time spent on the site justifies the commendable bounce rate on the website which stands at 46.84%.

How to access HDArea?

You can access HDArea by searching for the term ‘HDArea.co’ in your search engine. Alternatively, if you want to access the platform directly, you can use the following link: HDArea.

Design

HDArea sports a clean design. There are well-defined menus followed by various sections that make browsing and navigating across the website, effortless. Though I’m not a big fan of the logo and the subsequent pop-up donation banner, everything under the header looks quite cool. The black/yellow color combination along with red accents appears to be too much but is still palatable.

Header – The header section of this website is keywords-based i.e. it doesn’t feature static menu options.

Content – With not that many torrents, HDArea doesn’t have the most humongous free indie library. Nonetheless, most of these torrents are freeleech torrents and thus there’s not much to complain.

Desktop/Mobile experience

Browsing HDArea is seamless both on desktop and mobile devices. Since the website is ad-free, you don’t have to worry about annoying pop-ups or redirection. You can search for any free indie title directly and can even use the keywords to browse and download trending free indie content. Other than the search bar and content diversification, I like the quality-based options. You can choose not only the resolution but also individual client, codec, and audio codec, and original source.

Suggestions I have for HDArea

HDArea no doubt is an incredible platform which has the potential to become one of the best Chinese torrent tracking website. However, it lacks content depth and design appeal. If the devs add a 10-15k torrent, I believe that the engagement numbers would rise dramatically. Similarly, if the interface can be improvised, that will definitely help the Average Session Duration as well.

Conclusion

HDArea with all its flexibility is an amazing private torrent community. However, it has room for improvement and I feel that the devs are definitely working on improving the weak points. If given an opportunity, you should definitely check out this platform. Especially, if you can speak Mandarin, there’s plenty of cool content for you.