I’ve been using Mullvad for the past few months. Have not had many issues with it aside from the 5 device limit and the removal of port forwarding. I’m currently looking at Private Internet Access as a potential replacement. It looks like it offers 10 device limit and port forwarding included with the price.
Anyone using PIA? How’s the experience?
Edit: Probably should have mentioned, feel free to offer any other recommendations, I’m not attached to, or against any specific recommendations. I would like it to have a GUI available on Linux though if possible.
I have been using NordVPN since forever to be honest.
Never had any problem (servers always up and good speed too), but people say that it is very expensive in comparison with other VPN providers, so I don’t know.
Nord is such a weird case. It almost never gets recommended. It even gets negative comments as soon as someone mentions it. And yet, even the comparison table at r/VPN hast Nord at the top spot with full points for almost all criteria. So do people hate Nord just because they see other people hating it and go along? Or is r/VPN also just an ad for NordVPN?
I myself started using Nord quite a while back and I also never had any problem whatsoever. Speed is super good, availability was never a problem, it just works. Still, if someone would point me to some specific flaws with Nord and showed me how some other VPN is an improvement, I´d be happy to reconsider once my Nord subscription runs out in september.
I think people hate Nord because they spam their ads all over YouTube along with not offering things like port forwarding which is crucial for torrenting.
Nord does do a lot of sponsoring, that´s right. But that doesn´t make it a bad service automatically. If I want to believe that comparison table I mentioned, Nord might even be a pretty good service, so maybe they “need” this big marketing to rake in enough users to make it profitable and affordable.
About that port forwarding though, what´s the deal with that? I´m asking because I lack the tech background here. You say, it´s crucial for torrenting. And obviously, many look for alternatives to mullvad because they don´t offer it any more. Others though say they don´t really need port forwarding.
Without port forwarding, you can’t make incoming connections meaning you won’t be seeding your files back to anyone and it also limits outgoing connections which means downloads will be slower and may fail all together on torrents with few seeders.
Some people run without it using public trackers since you can just hit and run without seeding the files, but this would get you quickly banned on private trackers. It also goes against the principles of p2p if you’re never seeding your files back to anyone.
So you are saying, if I would torrent something while using Nord, there would be no upload / seeding happening at all? I use a seedbox, so I don´t know. In the seedbox though, I always keep the files up. I have an overall ratio of over 13, so I´m very much in favor of seeding.
Pretty much correct that (most) others wouldn’t be able to connect to your torrent client so you wouldn’t seed except in certain circumstances. Any private tracker would show you as unconnectable.
Indeed, looks like that´s correct. Just to test it, I fired up Q on my own machine, with Nord connected to a swiss server, and while I have no restrictions in place, there´s almost no upload.
Allow me to ask one further question: If I had a VPN which supported port forwarding, how would I go about to usilise that for torrenting? I know port forwarding from my internet router, where I can forward an external port directly to a specific internal IP. Is that similar?
Yes it’s similar but instead you configure Qbit to listen on that port in the settings. Each VPN does port forwarding in their own way but with Mullvad and AirVPN, you request a port forward, they assign one to you and then you input that into Qbit. You should see the green checkmark at the center bottom of the main UI window. If yellow, you don’t have incoming connections, and if red you don’t have incoming or outgoing connections.
Additionally, you can check ipleak.net and download the magnet torrent to make sure everything is working and that you’re not exposing your real IP in any way.
This message has been sponsored by NordVPN
Also, it doesn’t seem to be much more expensive than something like ExpressVPN, though that is pretty expensive at about $13 USD monthly. Way cheaper to buy yearly though. In comparison, Mullvad is a flat 5 Euro (about $5.20 - $5.40) per month. Other VPNs seem to be about $10-$13 per month.
I have not tried them, but always stayed away from them due to aggressive marketing that really put me off. there was a good year or two where I was bombarded with NordVPN ads and sponsors, and still get the occasional advert about them. It may be worth trying though, I have colleagues that use it.
You mentioned removal of port forwarding as an issue with Mullvad, why would you consider migrating to a much spammier VPN that has never had port forwarding? LOL that message really does sound like it was sponsored by NordVPN :P
I got the 3 years deal, so it is quite cheap for me.
Surfshark offered a similar deal that I bought a few years back. At the time it worked just fine for me, but they don’t offer port forwarding (at least they did not at the time I was using them), and they don’t have a Linux GUI.
Surfshark does have a Linux gui now. I got them because they had a really good deal going on at the time but I can’t comment if they’re the best option.
I’d say past security breaches are enough reason to stay away.