I’ve used proton for a year or two now and it is fine. Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi and it sort of kind of works with gluetun (the rotating port is annoying but it still is a forwarded port).
But I’ve increasingly been annoyed with Proton as a company and am looking to migrate my email/domain to fastmail in the very near future. I COULD continue to just pay for the vpn (60 USD a year is pretty reasonable) but also feel like this is a good opportunity to “shop around”
Checked the wiki and other FAQs (which all basically crib from said wiki) and they all basically boil down to proton or mullivad… except that mullivad apparently stopped allowing port forwarding which is a bit of an issue for any torrents and the like.
So are there any other good options?
Thanks
Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.
https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ
Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.
Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…
… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.
I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.
I love Mullvad, but if you need P2P its not the best option. If you just need a VPN, though, its amazing. Today I just switched to AirVPN and am running it on Arch through Eddie. Have my qbittorrent set up to only allow connections through Eddie and just forwarded my first port. I’m very happy with it.
I think the only downside is that I could get Mullvad for 5eur a month on a month by month basis. AirVPN is 7eur or 15eur for three months, so I have to lock into the three months to get the same price.
Other providers who know what they’re doing include cryptostorm.is, PIA, and ipredator.se
Or make your own with a VPS with openvpn or witeguard
Worth noting that Italy (location of airvpn) hates vpns and is constantly fucking around with them, to the point air doesn’t even actually operate in Italy to preserve users privacy. Right now, theres no immediate risk, but it’ is worth keeping an eye on the political situation in Italy regarding VPN laws
I did read this somewhere before. I just have to take my chances at the moment. My other option was Windscribe, but unless you’re paying for a year+ their prices are astronomical.
Just throwing in another voice for PIA. Their corporate owners may be questionable, but I’ve been with them since before they sold out and have never heard a peep from my ISP for seeding terabytes of torrents. They don’t keep logs, and they are audited to prove it regularly.
EDIT: They also have port forwarding, but not for every exit server.
Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi
If you just want the tunnel encryption you can try hosting a VPN on your own home network. It’s what I do since I don’t need to spoof my location.
You are asking in the piracy community so I’m assuming you’re also using it to torrent (which a home VPN won’t help with) but you didn’t specifiy so I’m not sure
I’ve used AirVPN for this exact setup and it works great. The port forwarding is static and doesn’t change once setup. I switched to proton because it was convenient, I was already paying for ProtonMail et all, so I dropped the extra VPN subscription when it renewed.
