Issues with Disconnections/Crashing

Note: I am not a very tech-savvy person, so I probably won't know the exact terms for the problems I'm having, but I will try and describe them as best I can.

Lately I've been having a lot of crashing issues with the digital version of FFXIV, and frankly it's got me a little confused. What I do know is that there is a little symbol on the top-right corner of the screen, and that when I hover over it with my cursor it gives me two numbers labeled "Sending" and "Receiving" (again, I don't know technical terms for this). The problem occurs when the "receiving" value becomes zero; when that happens, everything on my screen freezes in place. My character's animations, i.e. attacking, still go on when prompted, but it takes a long moment until anything actually happens. By the time I get back into the action, the enemy I was attacking is dead (killed by other party members) and my party is moving on way ahead of me. Sometimes I'd get disconnected from the server, and on two occasions had the entire client crash on me. According to my Internet provider (stating this as a fact), my connection via Ethernet cable is fine, ,making me think it was a problem with the game's own servers. I'm not so sure now, but I need to be sure: is there a way to fix this on my side of things? Or is there some other problem at work here that I'm not aware of?

A couple of more details before I open the floor:
1. My main realm is Exodus; I have a character on Famfrit, but haven't used her since I created her.
2. The connection, as mentioned above, is not wireless and is provided by the complex I live in.
3. The information about my Internet connection comes from professionals in my and my roommate's family, whom I trust. I am not making this up.
4. This has been going on ever since patch 2.3 went up. Had it not been for this week's hotfix doing nothing for it, I would've dismissed this as a post-patch issue.

I really need a solution to this, for it's causing huge problems to gameplay (kind of hard to dodge an attack when you can't see it). If anyone can help me solve this, I'd greatly appreciate it.