Hello, I’m new to all of this. What should one be looking for in a VPN? Is there a certain VPN more people recommend than others? I guess I’m just not really sure where to start here.
First thing I look at is location of HQ; from this depends how much privacy they can garantee. If it’s in the US, that’s an immediate nono.
I use Proton (Switzerland bases). Works great.
Using Proton as well. Got rid of google
Proton is a good service, but their years of reluctance to include more anonymous payment methods such as Monero and the inability to register an account from an anonymous IP address without a phone number makes me question the relative benefit of using them as a VPN.
These do not by themselves result in a compromise of anonymity if Proton is trustworthy and the Swiss laws still enable them to disassociate your identity (given via payments) and your account usage, but regulation and governments tend to become stricter rather than looser over time and I would demand more from a service you are entrusting with all your internet traffic.
Mullvad has been good for me.
- no personal info collected, not even email
- bandwidth has been good
- no pushy pricing/advertising
- based in Sweden
- wireguard
Replying to second Mullvad. Was super easy for me to set up on my iPhone.
Was what I always recommended until recently since their axing port forwarding.
Nothing bad to say privacy-wise but I’m using it to torrent.
You should be looking for a VPN with port forwarding support if you’re going to be torrenting. Good speeds, good prices and robust privacy practices are just as important as well.
I personally switched to AirVPN after Mullvad discontinued Port Forwarding support. It fit all the criteria I was looking for, and the 20 forwarded ports are really convenient if you use more than 1 P2P program.
I’ve been on AirVPN for about 12 years and I’ve never thought of a reason to switch off of them, great features for the price
I also went for AirVPN. Supports port forwarding and IPv6.
I have used: SaferVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad and ProtonVPN.
In my experience, Mullvad is great, I don’t require port-forwarding as I have a seedbox, so the recent changes have not been a problem for me.
I have only use the free tier of Proton VPN, which is very good. Definitely a good candidate.
NordVPN was actually not bad for me; it gave me good upload and downloads speeds and offers several servers(from the US). NordVPN does not offer a free trial, so I would suggest not to sign up for a long-term if you are interest on it. It does offer Meshnet for free, tough, which could be nice to share in between your devices (I prefer Tailscape for that). I switched to Mullvad because of privacy concerns.
SaferVPN was my first one, I learned the hard way about killing switches with this one. Also, the speeds were not great, to say the least.
Mullvad
I use AirVPN, as it’s run by privacy activists. From a technological point they might not be the best, but at least they believe in what they’re working on.
AirVPN user here, I really don’t see what issues they might have from a “technological point”? The only real issues I’ve had are the application’s slightly outdated UI, and the lack of application based split tunneling. Other than that, Air appears to have all the same features as Mullvad and even some they didn’t, like the more robust DNS filtering, and the ability to sort servers by latency and P2P download speeds.
They are not the fastest and don’t have the most servers, but I’m a fan so don’t front me ;)
If privacy is your goal, Mullvad is the way to go, IMO. We’re lucky to have a handful of decent VPN options rn, but Mullvad is an excellent product at maybe too good of a price.
Idk how well it works for region-locked content, if that’re your thing. I haven’t used it to get foreign Netflix content or anything, but privacy/security-wise, it’s excellent.
ive never had issue with private internet access
If you’re looking for a VPN for torrenting purposes just keep in mind that you’ll get better download/upload performance by subscribing to a torrent friendly VPN that offers port forwarding. Unfortunately many VPN services don’t offer that feature.
I use IVPN, mainly convenience as you can just pay for it for a week at a time. Also nice is you can make an account without email. You just get a string like an activation code.
I’m using Mullvad. AirVPN before that. Never any issues with either of them.
Been using Nord mostly because of speeds and location choices. Cheap too.
I’m using NordVPN
