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 was on PIA for a few years before it was bought out by Kape.
Kape has a poor track record with keeping user data safe, and has reported shady business practises.
I switched to Mullvad and have been happy, excluding the limited devices which I bump into pretty frequently.
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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.
Mullvad offers anonymous payment plans. Which natively adds a layer of anonymity. So as long as there is never any saving. For example Nord vs Mullvad. I use Nord but there is no anonymity with the provider. Where Mullvad “doesnt” need to know. That’s as much as I have figured.
It looks like IVPN is pretty similar in terms of anonymity
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
There’s nothing inherently wrong with windscribe but I don’t trust any company that offers a cheap lifetime plan for something that requires so much upkeep.
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.
IVPN, no contest.
ivpn looks nice, it looks like they are taking a similar approach/structure to account creation like mullvad does. I don’t like the 7 device limit though, but it is still 2 more than mullvad.
+1 for GUI on linux.
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.
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 has been solid for me. Switched to wireguard recently and have been able to completely saturate my 1gbps fiber link
I’ve heard that AirVPN and IVPN are good for port forwarding.
I moved off PIA after they were bought by a former ad-ware distributor, and I’ve been on Proton VPN since.
They do currently have a Linux GUI, though it’s extensively lacking compared to the Windows client, and the CLI / DIY methods for using their service is much more flushed out.
That’s not to say it’s a bad client, it’s just very much not what they advertise feature-wise. The speeds and server-availability are all great, and these days it’s all bundled into a “Proton Account” that gives you VPN, Email, and Cloud Storage based on your tier.
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.
Moved from PIA to Mullvad when it was sold to a new owner with bad reputation
I’ve used PIA for five years now. Never had an issue. It’s plenty fast for my needs; I’ve seen sustained ~450 Mbps downloads from a transatlantic endpoint. (I honestly don’t know what is typical with other VPN services but I’m not feeling choked out so I’ve never investigated.)
They run frequent deals and you can stack a promo code, check slickdeals and/or set an alert if there is not a current promotion. I believe my current three year sub worked out to ~$1.80/month. It is suspiciously cheap.
I’m sure others are “better” and “you get what you pay for” but PIA is good enough for the price for me.
“Better” or “you get what you pay for” aside, the owner of PIA is patently sketchy.
I use mine exclusively for torrents, so I don’t really care what is happening on the other end as long as they are masking my IP address. If you were using it for general browsing I could see that mattering more. But it’s really hard to beat the speeds + port forwarding for $2.22/mo ($80 for 3 years). That’s less than half the price of any comparable alternatives.
I’ve been using PIA for a long time.
PIA only offers port forwarding with servers in certain regions. For example I’m in the USA and I have to connect to a server in Canada for port forwarding. Works fine though.
I don’t use PIA on multiple devices so I’m not sure if there are device limitations, but I don’t think there are (don’t quote me on that).
PIA has a no-logs privacy guarantee by external audit which is the best you can ask for.
In general I’m pretty happy with the software and service. It’s the cheapest game in town if you go with the the three year sub, last time I renewed it worked out to $2.33 a month.
The one negative is a change in ownership a few years ago. It was bought by a company with a less than stellar reputation (Kape Technologies). Though honestly I’ve not seen any negatives come of it myself. For some people it’s a deal breaker. I was going to find a new provider when my sub ran out last, but I took the easy route and renewed.
Just looked it up and found this post (link here) by PIA from a few months ago, looks like unlimited devices is a recent addition to their service.
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
