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
If you want port forwarding the choice is between AirVPN, ProtonVPN and Njalla. Iirc PIA also supports port forwarding, but their ownerships reputation is no good.
Mullvad, IVPN and many other services don’t support port forwarding.
Do you have any experience with Njalla? This would be my first time purchasing a VPN and I couldn’t imagine a better provider on paper.
I just don’t know anything practical about it besides it’s founded by a member of the swedish pirate party.
I’ve never used them but I heard about them in the context of private DNS and VPS hosting. E.g. they act as a middleman to shield domain the shield the client from authorities (at least to some extent — they still have to follow the laws).
Given their focus on privacy I’d trust them for torrenting at least as much as the other options. As a first VPN I’d say it’s great because of their flat 5€/m price. A few years ago I used Mullvad for that purpose — until they removed port forwarding.
Why do we care about their ownership if it’s proven that they don’t log and let you forward ports?
Given there’re alternatives I’d rather choose an independent service instead.
But that’s a personal decision which is why I mentioned PIA with the disclaimer, instead of ignoring them.
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You’re right but if it’s something that sensitive I’d rather use TOR/I2P
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I2P is not an option because I’m using a VPN for regular internet traffic. As much as I like the idea of I2P, there’s just no I2P torrent sites with the selection of content I want.
Tor is not an option for torrents.
I think PIA is decent for torrenting and Mullvad for privacy
That’s fine. It completely depends on your threat model and your preferences. To this date I haven’t heard anything negative about PIA except their owners, so it’s fair to trust them. I just want to point out that you can have both with other providers.
Generating a random account number is a unique and great feature of Mullvad.
But other providers allow for the same privacy. E.g. AirVPN does not require a valid email address. Any random string works for all required fields (email, username, password). Payment via Monero is available too. Njalla does require a valid email address (it sends a confirmation mail), but any tempmail provider works (which you could access through Tor). They also accept Monero.
Impressive, I didn’t know AirVPN accepted XMR. That greatly influences my decision about them vs PIA and others. I wanted a VPN which I could pay for anonymously and could torrent with (open ports)