Hello, I’m new to all of this. What should one be looking for in a VPN? Is there a certain VPN more people recommend than others? I guess I’m just not really sure where to start here.

  • luc891@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    First thing I look at is location of HQ; from this depends how much privacy they can garantee. If it’s in the US, that’s an immediate nono.

    I use Proton (Switzerland bases). Works great.

    • BermudaHighball@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Proton is a good service, but their years of reluctance to include more anonymous payment methods such as Monero and the inability to register an account from an anonymous IP address without a phone number makes me question the relative benefit of using them as a VPN.

  • traches@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Mullvad has been good for me.

    • no personal info collected, not even email
    • bandwidth has been good
    • no pushy pricing/advertising
    • based in Sweden
    • wireguard
    • earthling@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Was what I always recommended until recently since their axing port forwarding.

      Nothing bad to say privacy-wise but I’m using it to torrent.

  • –Phase–@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    You should be looking for a VPN with port forwarding support if you’re going to be torrenting. Good speeds, good prices and robust privacy practices are just as important as well.

    I personally switched to AirVPN after Mullvad discontinued Port Forwarding support. It fit all the criteria I was looking for, and the 20 forwarded ports are really convenient if you use more than 1 P2P program.

  • Freezable2095@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I have used: SaferVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad and ProtonVPN.

    In my experience, Mullvad is great, I don’t require port-forwarding as I have a seedbox, so the recent changes have not been a problem for me.

    I have only use the free tier of Proton VPN, which is very good. Definitely a good candidate.

    NordVPN was actually not bad for me; it gave me good upload and downloads speeds and offers several servers(from the US). NordVPN does not offer a free trial, so I would suggest not to sign up for a long-term if you are interest on it. It does offer Meshnet for free, tough, which could be nice to share in between your devices (I prefer Tailscape for that). I switched to Mullvad because of privacy concerns.

    SaferVPN was my first one, I learned the hard way about killing switches with this one. Also, the speeds were not great, to say the least.

  • Anamana@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I use AirVPN, as it’s run by privacy activists. From a technological point they might not be the best, but at least they believe in what they’re working on.

  • ADHDefy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    If privacy is your goal, Mullvad is the way to go, IMO. We’re lucky to have a handful of decent VPN options rn, but Mullvad is an excellent product at maybe too good of a price.

    Idk how well it works for region-locked content, if that’re your thing. I haven’t used it to get foreign Netflix content or anything, but privacy/security-wise, it’s excellent.

  • Kyo_Jazz@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I use IVPN, mainly convenience as you can just pay for it for a week at a time. Also nice is you can make an account without email. You just get a string like an activation code.

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    If you’re looking for a VPN for torrenting purposes just keep in mind that you’ll get better download/upload performance by subscribing to a torrent friendly VPN that offers port forwarding. Unfortunately many VPN services don’t offer that feature.