Could there be something that is capping a download speed on my server? Its supposed to be on a 100mbps connection, yet anytime I download something *no matter where* the speed seems to be capped around 8-10KBps, even when I can download from the same hosts at my connections cap (~300KB/sec)

Your request for help is not written very clearly. You might want to provide more details about what you are doing if you want to find the answer to your problem.

You mention wget in the title but not in the body of your post. Is the problem occurring only with wget? What about the firefox download manager? What do you mean by 'my server" ...

The download rate for retrieval by wget is capped by adding a limit rate, as per the following example:
This will limit the retrieval rate to 20KB/s.

If you do not specify a limit, then the download will be retrieved at the maximum possible speed.

Learn how to use wget by studying the man page. wget is a wonderful powerful tool.

Thanks for the reply, sorry for not being specific.

My command is

wget -cb http://www.somewebsite.com/file.zip

Seems that the speed is capped at ~8KB/sec no matter what.

I only have SSH access to the server in question.

Even setting a limit rate of 500k, the download goes no faster than 8KB/sec.

I hope this is not stating the obvious, but have you checked if the slow download speed is only a problem with with wget? Could it be a network configuration issue, or a hardware problem?

Well my connection is around a 300 KB/sec download and 36 KB/sec upload.

I can download and upload to the server in question at my maximum speed.

Would there be any kind of other way I could test my connection speed through the shell?

tcptrack might do the trick.

Or bwmon, bmon-ng, vnstat, ipband, or any others you might find.