I’ve been using Mullvad for the past few months. Have not had many issues with it aside from the 5 device limit and the removal of port forwarding. I’m currently looking at Private Internet Access as a potential replacement. It looks like it offers 10 device limit and port forwarding included with the price.
Anyone using PIA? How’s the experience?
Edit: Probably should have mentioned, feel free to offer any other recommendations, I’m not attached to, or against any specific recommendations. I would like it to have a GUI available on Linux though if possible.
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I switched to AirVPN after finding out that Mullvad disabled port forwarding. I have heard rumors that the did that because of people hosting cheese pizza via their VPN accounts.
The performance of AirVPN does vary, I had to try a couple of countries before I found a server that didn’t throttle me (and I only have a 50MBit connection).
Maybe I will try Proton in the future, but then I would have to commit to a 2year subscription or pay a lot more.
Airvpn is my go-to. Tho I also have an account with pia. Airvpn for PTP is pretty simple to set up, has great support for Linux, and you can choose from multiple protocols and ports pretty easy. Their port forwarding is way simpler to setup on a server then pia.
Pia is great for me to use on my phone/laptop tho. Their client is much more ment to be interactive as opposed to set and forget.
Airvpn certainly isn’t the fastest but the community is awesome and support is amazing.
Another vote here for ProtonVPN, though it doesn’t support port forwarding via a GUI on Linux, only OpenSSL and Wireguard configs. I set it up with gluetun, qBittorrent, and qBittorrent-natmap and and it just works.
I’ve heard that the open port rotates. Is that true? Because it will affect seeding.
You dynamically request “a port” from the vpn gateway and it returns your port number.
As long as your nat-pmp-client keeps refreshing the port, it should stay the same. The timeout is rather low (60s afaik) so it probably wouldn’t survive restarts.There’s a docker image that automates this for qbittorrent, but it shouldn’t be overly complicated to adapt the script to other clients, if they can be configured via an API.
ProtonVPN has been solid for me. Switched to wireguard recently and have been able to completely saturate my 1gbps fiber link
I use Windscribe with a lifetime plan and I’ve been more than happy with it.
Seconding Windscribe. Using them since the Mullvad port forward death.
Protonvpn Unlimited subscriber here. Pretty amazing ngl. I get 10 vpn connections, 500GB E2EE cloud storage, simplelogin premium, calendar, and whatever else they have that I haven’t used yet or still in development.
Edit: and ofc, I use their e2ee mail serveice
Proton unlimited is pretty enticing with the email and drive, especially since I’m using Zoho for free custom domain email, I wouldn’t mind using proton.
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Probably overkill, but AstrillVPN is the one I have been using for the past several years and it never failed me.
Same, and it’s the best if you’re in China.
I’ve really enjoyed Torguard so far, althought I switched very recently.
If you decide to use Torguard, USE AN AFFILIATE CODE FOR 50% OFF. I used Tom Spark’s (YouTubers) code, but Torguard makes it really easy for any creator to generate a code so use whoever’s you’d like to support.
EDIT: It has a linux gui, which oddly must be run at root. I added a line to create an exception for only my user to be allowed to run /usr/bin/torguard as root without a password in /etc/sudoers, and it works as expected.
Loving ProtonVPN, but note that if you also use ProtonMail, the account is shared, meaning no one else can use your VPN if you don’t want people to have access to your email. I’ve tried to use vopono, and vopono needs access to your account to automatically configure VPN connections which, again, is not great because access to my VPN = access to my email 😐
Yeah, that kind of sucks, I originally bought surfshark a few years ago just for this. Unlimited devices is a +1 for me
I’ve used PIA for probably close to 10 years now. They removed the 10-device limit recently and just give you unlimited devices now. I’ve found the connection to be very stable. If there’s ever a problem, it’s usually due to a specific server getting overloaded, so I switch to a different one. Lots of countries and port forwarding options to choose from. The promotion they have going right now is the best I’ve seen ($79 for 39 months).
Torguard. Sticky IPs with port forwarding. Wireguard support for fast speeds. Lots of coupons around the 'net to purchase for $30/year.
The ease at which Torguard is willing to give me a persistent IP is something I haven’t found in other VPN providers
Basically 3 good choices
ProtonVPN AirVPN IVPN
Proton has a 50% off student discount bringing the price down to $5 a month for all proton services.
IVPN is probably the best but most expensive.
@MedicareForSome @pirat Windscribe
Where do you see Proton being 50% off for students?
I can’t find anything about that.They don’t advertise it, just message support from your .edu email and tell them your username. They’ll apply it and let you use the STUDENT promo code. It’s 50% off the year plan so $5 a month.
Oh alright. I’ll have to do that then.
Thanks for the info.
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It looks like IVPN is pretty similar in terms of anonymity
You can literally buy an account anonymously with cash, I don’t think any other provider comes close to that
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Other providers come close, as I would consider Monero to be close to as anonymous as cash in the mail. But I don’t know of any others who accept monero and do not require an email address.
I’ve enjoyed MozillaVPN because it’s made by Mozilla.
And, honestly, not really any other reason, i just trust the company that makes it over the others. In fact, it has a significant downside in that it doesn’t have an app kill switch like NordVPN, so your torrent app can keep running unprotected.
Note that Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad’s network under the hood. Also, depending on your device you should be able to block connections that don’t use the VPN. On Android, the “kill switch” can be found in the settings as described here: https://mullvad.net/en/help/using-mullvad-vpn-on-android/#block-without-vpn
Bind your torrent client to the VPN so that doesn’t happen. Qbit has an easy enough interface to figure out how to do it pretty easy. Plenty of guides a quick Google should return
I have been using NordVPN since forever to be honest.
Never had any problem (servers always up and good speed too), but people say that it is very expensive in comparison with other VPN providers, so I don’t know.
This message has been sponsored by NordVPN
Also, it doesn’t seem to be much more expensive than something like ExpressVPN, though that is pretty expensive at about $13 USD monthly. Way cheaper to buy yearly though. In comparison, Mullvad is a flat 5 Euro (about $5.20 - $5.40) per month. Other VPNs seem to be about $10-$13 per month.
I have not tried them, but always stayed away from them due to aggressive marketing that really put me off. there was a good year or two where I was bombarded with NordVPN ads and sponsors, and still get the occasional advert about them. It may be worth trying though, I have colleagues that use it.
I got the 3 years deal, so it is quite cheap for me.
Surfshark offered a similar deal that I bought a few years back. At the time it worked just fine for me, but they don’t offer port forwarding (at least they did not at the time I was using them), and they don’t have a Linux GUI.
Surfshark does have a Linux gui now. I got them because they had a really good deal going on at the time but I can’t comment if they’re the best option.
Nord is such a weird case. It almost never gets recommended. It even gets negative comments as soon as someone mentions it. And yet, even the comparison table at r/VPN hast Nord at the top spot with full points for almost all criteria. So do people hate Nord just because they see other people hating it and go along? Or is r/VPN also just an ad for NordVPN?
I myself started using Nord quite a while back and I also never had any problem whatsoever. Speed is super good, availability was never a problem, it just works. Still, if someone would point me to some specific flaws with Nord and showed me how some other VPN is an improvement, I´d be happy to reconsider once my Nord subscription runs out in september.
I think people hate Nord because they spam their ads all over YouTube along with not offering things like port forwarding which is crucial for torrenting.
Nord does do a lot of sponsoring, that´s right. But that doesn´t make it a bad service automatically. If I want to believe that comparison table I mentioned, Nord might even be a pretty good service, so maybe they “need” this big marketing to rake in enough users to make it profitable and affordable.
About that port forwarding though, what´s the deal with that? I´m asking because I lack the tech background here. You say, it´s crucial for torrenting. And obviously, many look for alternatives to mullvad because they don´t offer it any more. Others though say they don´t really need port forwarding.
Without port forwarding, you can’t make incoming connections meaning you won’t be seeding your files back to anyone and it also limits outgoing connections which means downloads will be slower and may fail all together on torrents with few seeders.
Some people run without it using public trackers since you can just hit and run without seeding the files, but this would get you quickly banned on private trackers. It also goes against the principles of p2p if you’re never seeding your files back to anyone.
So you are saying, if I would torrent something while using Nord, there would be no upload / seeding happening at all? I use a seedbox, so I don´t know. In the seedbox though, I always keep the files up. I have an overall ratio of over 13, so I´m very much in favor of seeding.
Pretty much correct that (most) others wouldn’t be able to connect to your torrent client so you wouldn’t seed except in certain circumstances. Any private tracker would show you as unconnectable.
Indeed, looks like that´s correct. Just to test it, I fired up Q on my own machine, with Nord connected to a swiss server, and while I have no restrictions in place, there´s almost no upload.
Allow me to ask one further question: If I had a VPN which supported port forwarding, how would I go about to usilise that for torrenting? I know port forwarding from my internet router, where I can forward an external port directly to a specific internal IP. Is that similar?
