It would be a very good provider if you actually had 10Mbit/s available on the up and downlink. You are more likely to see things in the few hunderd kbits/s range if that were the case. It is more likely that your ftp server can't (won't) do more than 10Mbit/s. Perhaps your disk is using pio transfers and blocking interrupts. hdparm /dev/hda should show the current settings. I typically have to use 'hdparm -u1 -d1 /dev/hda' to get any kind of performance out of an IDE drive.

What also matters somewhat is whether the local lan is connected with switches or hubs. hubs turn the link into a shared medium, the interfaces work half duplex (can't send and receive at the same time) and you actually can get collissions and are affected by other traffic on the lan. Some people force their network cards into full duplex mode on a hub and actually destroy the last bits of performance because the system is now sending acks while still receiving data and therefore causes a considerable amount of collisions. ifconfig eth1 should show the various counters that are useful in diagnosing such problems. You would also see a lot of packet loss when running something like 'ping -f'.