There’s way too much hype over VPN Providers, but do not forget, you are routing all your traffic through their servers
As a general advice, if a VPN provider keeps logs of your activity, does not allow you to pay with crypto, and generally spends way too much on youtube ads is probably not an ideal choice.
Do not follow any advice/recommendation blindly, do your own research on which one offers the best service for your own needs.
Something that people need to realize: If you want a VPN for PRIVACY, Mullvad (edit: also maybe IVPN) is the only good option on this list. They make it very easy for you to maintain complete anonymity, they don’t even WANT your email address, you can use crypto, or you can literally mail them an envelope of cash with a note inside containing your unique ID and they’ll load up your account with that value. It’s ridiculous how seriously they take this stuff. And if you’re really concerned about privacy, you should also be taking extra steps like using a hardened OS and browser, and using disposable virtual machines. But I suspect that most of us here aren’t that concerned with actual privacy.
If you want a VPN for PIRACY, any of these options are probably fine as long as they don’t block or slow torrent traffic. Just use the fastest one here that you can afford. The only thing you’re really doing in this case is blocking your torrent traffic from your ISP. Remember, if you give them a credit card and your email address, then that’s not private! It’s just for piracy. It’s important to look at your priorities and pick a VPN accordingly.
Mullvad Mullvad Mullvad
Mysterium Network
If you want privacy and great speeds better to use a dVPN.
deleted by creator
You welcome my bud ✌️👍
If someone starts his list with NordVPN you know its complete and utter bullshit
That’s not how the annual Torrentfreak VPN questionnaire works.
It doesn’t work good if they act like all those providers are a considerable choice
They don’t. I suspect you haven’t actually read one of these articles in detail.because it is in no way a recommendation from TorrentFreak. It literally opens with this:
The VPN review business is also flourishing as well. Just do a random search for “best VPN service” or “VPN review” and you’ll see dozens of sites filled with recommendations and preferred picks. Some VPN companies, such as Kape, even own review sites.
At TF we don’t want to make any recommendations. When it comes to privacy and anonymity, an outsider can’t offer any guarantees. Vulnerabilities are always lurking around the corner and even with the most secure VPN, you still have to trust the VPN company with your data.
Instead, we aim to provide an unranked overview of VPN providers, asking them questions we believe are important. Many of these questions relate to privacy and security, and the various companies answer them in their own words.
We hope that this helps users to make an informed choice. However, we stress that users themselves should always make sure that their VPN setup is secure, working correctly, and not leaking. Also, we advise people to properly research the company behind the VPN service.
NordVPN appears first because it is a sponsor, as is clearly stated:
*Note: Private Internet access, ExpressVPN and NordVPN are TorrentFreak sponsors. We reserve the first three spots for them as a courtesy. This article also includes a few affiliate links which help us pay the bills. We never sell positions in our review article or charge providers for a listing.
The same questions are put to every VPN provider on the list. It is unranked - whether they first or last is completely irrelevant.
But they are presenting the answers equal to others. That’s the point. You can’t make an article and ask some scientist and a madman questions and then present the answers next to each other, pretending the madman has equally valid output. They should put disclaimers on each provider with the different problems that occur with the certain provider. Like they were caught logging, they were breached, they are under bad jurisdictions etc
Like they were caught logging, they were breached, they are under bad jurisdictions etc
TorrentFreak already puts these questions directly to the providers. Again, do everyone a favour and actually read this article you are so intent on criticising. You seem to have absolutely zero understanding of it. It’s almost as if you skipped directly to NordVPN, saw it was listed first and made up this entire fake story in your head.
I did and I know they put the questions to the provider, but what is it worth if they have been caught lying but still answer “no we don’t log” I believe they should highlight that fact.
I use Mullvad. They have you buy time upfront at a fixed price, have lots of payment options, and at one point were subpoenaed and proved to the Swedish government they don’t store any user data and therefore have nothing to turn over. They have a nice app too, I like them.
They’re disabling port forwarding due to some bad actors… That’s why we can’t have nice things.
For those who don’t know, port forwarding is mainly used for torrent seeders, aka the people who upload files to other people.
I use mysterium VPN because it has residential IPs, but remember that all your traffic is going through some random person’s network.
So how bad is nord vpn seeing as that is all over YouTube?
Anyone used ProtonVPN before? What’s your thought?
Years ago I did it on a Black Friday or Christmas deal. They gave me instructions to test that my IP wasn’t leaking and their support was very helpful in confirming. I think they gave me protonmail for free alongside my subscription at the time?
They were pretty fast and I felt user-friendly.
I hadn’t used them in years so not sure if any of these still hold true though.
Wasn’t PIA bought out by a company that keeps logs a couple years ago? Interesting it made it on this list.
I’ve been using PIA for years for my downloading purposes, as well as having a VPN when I travel. No issues at all and completely reliable. Don’t know if I’d trust them to leak state secrets, but not an issue because I don’t have any.
I’ve been using AirVPN for a long time now and can 100% recommend it, they even have port forwarding.
I’ve used them for well over ten years at this point. Highly recommended from me too.
They used to be one of the more commonly recommended services a few years ago, but they seem to have sort-of slipped off most people’s radar. I’m not sure why.
I still highly recommend Mullvad, they are generally an awesome company and havent had many issues with them beyond a few random sites blocking them which is to be expected.
Mullvad used to be the no-brainer choice until they stopped supporting port forwarding. I kinda need it for seeding. ProtonVPN seems like a good idea for now.
I find that weird that so many struggle without port forwarding… my seeding is going just fine without port forwarding.
You’ll be fine in public trackers without port forwarding due to the abundance of participants. In private trackers, it matters much more.
What is the difference exactly? Can’t tell if I’m missing something fundamental or what. In my head there’s no reason you’d run into issues
There’s no technical difference, but there are differences in practice.
First of all, in order to transfer any content, one of the participants need an open port. In case of public trackers, there are usually a lot of users, so someone will probably have a port open that you can connect to. Also, many don’t even realize that they have open ports, since routers can open them on demand by uPnP. For private trackers, since the userpool is much smaller, it matters more.
Also, for public trackers, you don’t really HAVE TO seed and maintain a good ratio. It’s the right thing to do, but is by no means a necessity. For private trackers, on the other hand, your account will be suspended in most cases if your ratio goes too low.
I switched to Torguard and have gotten MUCH better speeds than I do with Proton and marginally better speeds than Mullvad. I had issues setting up port forwarding, but it was user error and Torguard customer support is next fucking level so I got that taken care of.
Overall, no complaints so far.
They also accept crypto payments, however there is an email requirement.
Been using TorGuard for 2 years. My only complaint is that there was this once they insisted it was a client side issue for one of the servers in my home country. I was so pissed off because it was slow and disconnecting all the time and only on that server.
Switched to Mullvad and loved it until port forwarding was removed… but now I’m back to TorGuard reluctantly. The customer support didn’t want to accept the possibility that their servers were going through some issues… didn’t even bother to check just because the server was online so it had to be client side but ever other server worked perfectly.
Yeah, I would still be using mullvad if they hadn’t removed port forwarding – it’s too damn bad but I get why they needed it. Switched to Proton but I imagine they’ll run into the same issue down the road and will need to find a more permanent solution.
I recently made the switch from Surfshark to Mullvad. No real complaints about the actual VPN service with Surfshark, but the desktop app was constantly advertising their other products and was becoming bloated. Mullvad just does what I want it to do with little fuss.
Pity they removed port forwarding.
