Try regular FTP without the VPN and see if it's the encryption that's hurting you. I am no expert here, but I didn't think VPN required a port 22 connection, but maybe it does? Anyways, any advice would be much appreciated. its just encrypted data being sent out, maybe they can do funny things with port 22 and that is what is causing sftp to be slow, but I assume VPN is totally different, I am just transferring via copy past in windows, so that is using whatever protocol windows uses over a secure VPN. Is there any easy explanation for why this is? I don't know how an ISP would be able so slow down an SFTP transfer. It still gets full speed on the local network. Why in the world would this be!? I used to have the nas when I was living in college and had ~25/5 internet and people where able to SFTP into it and get my full upload speed out of it, plus or minus some. All three ways which used two different protocols all resulted in 200-250 Kbps. Said screw it to everything and just used filezilla as an SFTP client, SAME SPEED. Well we tried that, CPU load didn't really change, and still exact same speeds.

Then I said, ok, maybe the R7000 doesn't have the CPU headroom to really encrypt stuff on the fly, lets throw the VPN on the nas itself which has an i3 that runs at sub 10% load all the time. He has 200/20 internet and I have 25/4 so really shouldn't be an issue. Well, I was only able to get ~200 Kb/s plus or minus. Hey guys, so my buddy just a nice little router that has VPN built in, its a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 I believe, and we set up a VPN between us so I can get at the NAS that we both share (check my sig).

Filezilla sftp download speed low