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What is the VPN that works best for you?
I've lately been looking for a new VPN, mainly out of privacy concerns. My question is, what is the best VPN that has worked for you (either paid or free) and why?
I've lately been looking for a new VPN, mainly out of privacy concerns. My question is, what is the best VPN that has worked for you (either paid or free) and why?
Never use free VPNs. I know of 2 good (not very expensive) ones:
Check them out.
The mullvad client is FOSS (and partially written in rust, interestingly).
Are free VPNs more vulnerable?
It seems that the one I'm using – Browsec as a Chrome extension – is often used by malicious actors, since Google asks me to do captcha much more often if I traverse the 'Net with it enabled.
Nice, thank you!
airvpn is quality and almost keeps up with my internet speed
If only they would be more welcoming towards wireguard.
Back when i chose mine i ended up using Private Internet Access
It offered everything that we should look for people said, and it looked that way to me.
The big difference with this company is that they already had shown what they do when a government or company asks to tap data. When the Russian government asked to do this, they stopped all their business within Russia, packed their servers and took them elsewhere.
I am nowhere close knowledge wise to the people here on Tildes, but it`s also the people i listen to when it comes to these important decisions(on reddit back then). I just bought a new 2 year subscription without checking if i should change, did i do a smart decision this time around? Perhaps things have changed.
Big fan of PIA. They recently redid their UI on all platforms and it's a huge improvement over the old one.
I've been using it for 3 years and never had this issue, although it does need to reconnect whenever internet reconnects for whatever reason.
I think this started happening after their last big update. It happens to myself once and while. And it seems to be affected where i am connecting to. I get it pretty often while i watch twitch, but not when i play online games. We should make contact with them.
Before there was an easily found button to click to make speed complaints. This is another type of issue, but it seems to be easy to contact their support and tech people.
Pretty much the exact same reason I chose them. Really not a big fan of them being US based but it doesn't get much better anywhere else.
Been using them for about 3 years now, and just signed a 3 year deal at the old prices which unlocks it for up to 10 devices for me. My Dad also uses them.
Very happy with their speeds and the reliability, and their most recent MacOS client is a big improvement on their previous versions.
I've had some issues with disconnections on long sessions - but I can reconnect immediately so it's not a huge problem - but my Dad tends to run with it on 24/7 and hasn't had any issues like that. I guess it's related to the endpoint/server you're exiting at.
Probably a good time to mention That One Privacy Site. The person running this site is extremely transparent and genuinely seems to care about privacy. He has reviews of basically every VPN service you would want to use, in addition to the page I've linked which gives a set of resources for choosing a good VPN that suits your needs.
It's honestly surprising how many companies he's reviewed either in his blog or Excel chart, and found lacking. There seem to be relatively few companies out there that really care about both your privacy and you as a customer.
Just a heads up for those interested, I think the VPN comparison chart was last updated in August or something like that.
This is the website i recommend to someone who knows nothing about these things. it`s a very helpful.
I personally use NordVPN, because I got a pretty great deal of 3 years of it for around 100$. I don't use it all the time though, only their proxy services for torrents.
I also use NordVPN and I was always happy with them, but, after reading some troubling news about them being related to a data-mining company (Tesonet), now I'm not so sure. I think I'll just let it expire and use another service (maybe AirVPN or Mullvad, but I have to research better). They really went to a lot of trouble to make other blogs to take down these news and give excuses (on hacker news discussions) when to me, the evidence seems pretty clear. You can read it in some blogs or you can read it more on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18609655
To be clear, there was a nontrivial amount of evidence that that connection was being made out to be much more significant than it really was by some of Nord's competitors, and Nord backed up their claims that they still don't keep any logs with a third party audit that specifically determined that they do not keep logs. There's a public blog post about it here, and if you're a NordVPN subscriber, you can see substantially more detail about the audit here
Thank you! I'm going to check it out.
I already trust and pay for ProtonMail so switched to ProtonVPN when it came out. I now use it on all of my devices without issue.
I made an account and was about to look at how to make use of ProtonMail. I tried to send a test mail to it but it never showed up, i ran out of time and lost interest. I need to stop being lazy and set it up properly.
I just host my own WireGuard server, but I do it for avoiding censorship and for very basic privacy. If you want more privacy, a "public" VPN is the way to go, since you'll blend in with other people using the service, but you'll probably get slower speeds.
As for a recommendation, I used ProtonVPN for a month on my phone, and it was pretty good. I'd probably use it on my desktop if it weren't for my ISP blocking it, and having to "bootstrap" through my own WireGuard server was just too much work for me.
I have tried ProtonVPN, but I do feel that 100€ a year is too expensive for what they offer.
It seems near impossible to evaluate the service. Like insurance, you can have little idea how useful or high quality the product until you need it.
That said, private internet access has been shown on at least a couple occasions to be true to their claim of no logs. They're also the least expensive.
And for my purposes, the performance is fine.
PIA is by far my preferred, consistently proven to be on the side of the consumer in terms of privacy.
I got a year of PIA on a humble bundle a while ago and it's worked great so far
Could you elaborate on this? I've heard there are problems with kill switches, but I don't know the pros/cons of them vs. binding to an interface.
I use a cheap shadowsocks vpn reseller because it’s really cheap (6 usd every 3 months). A little hesitant to link it in fear of it getting shut down since it’s such a good deal.
I use it to avoid censorship and they offer something like 50 endpoints at the price I’m grandfathered into. They’re also faster than I’ve ever been able to get my own servers set up to. I do need to try again some time with wireguard.