VPN Recommendation Thread

I use proton and it's fine for that. Even has port forwarding if you care about seeding.

Do not torrent on mullvad it's p much only good for leeching no port forwarding. Also never trust any vpn and there are a limited # of tor exit nodes, all of them are likely owned by creepy crypto guys who have to be CIA good luck. Better than nothing so I guess go with the best one for torrenting speed like airvpn

Mozilla VPN

It's IIRC Proton VPN, same cost, but it helps fund Mozilla

The most recommended VPN from the people who are really into internet privacy is Mullvad, so that's what I use.

Airvpn has port forwarding

I personally use Astrill VPN for any private browsing plus seeding/leeching. Works great for me and has been for past 6 or so years, got it while being in China and haven’t really changed to another one

I've looked into this a bit. I'm hoping to eventually find a straight up Chinese or Russian VPN provider - adversarial countries won't share with 14 eyes and other western nations. Haven't found one yet, Kaspersky is Russian origin but is owned by a holding company in the UK, but they do have Russian servers. Nord looks kinda promising, based in Panama, but there's no data retention laws there and they operate most of their servers as diskless, which is nice.

I've been using PIA because they were the cheapest on a 3 year plan. It works out to around $2 a month. It's not the best because you need to use their app or some other workaround to get port forwarding to work, but it was the cheapest last time I looked.

I use it with the binhex/qbittorrentVPN docker container on my homeserver, it automatically connects and configures the port forwarding to make uploading work, it's a pretty complicated setup but once it's setup it works flawlessly.

Been using windscribe for a couple years now. Very fast, pirated literally everything I can, no issues. Can't say for sure they wouldn't sell you down the river if they needed to, BUT they have a "build your own" plan thing, where you can literally just choose like 2 server locations for 3$ a month.

NordVPN seems pretty solid. Been using it for a bit over a year. Price seemed reasonable when I bought into the plan. I'm definitely not a super genius when it comes to this stuff and it was able to get it set up on my ancient PC and slightly less ancient iPhone without too much trouble.

I've torrented and seeded a few small handfulls of movies/TV series and download ROMS/.ISO's fairly frequently and the speeds are good enough for me.

I know there's instructions for using NordVPN on a Linux machine but its more of the "everything is done through command line instead of GUI interface" and I haven't forced myself to stare at the walkthroughs and commit myself to "trial and error" by fire yet.

I was on nord, now on proton. For various reasons, I'm not happy with the latter - I know it sounds like shilling, but nord gives out stupid long-term deals all the time, got me reliable service on phone and laptops, and I ended up quite trusting that shadow Panamanian company and its supposedly "independent" audits. I moved to proton only for their political stance, but at the end if the day it is just another profit-oriented business that doesn't necessarily cater, or straight care, for one's needs.

I am sure there's tons of reasons not to be on nord (hey, I fell for it, too); so maybe Mozilla then? Indeed supporting a nice project rather than a private company, even if only partially.