I was reading through the comments on this post, and noticed a couple peopie mentioning VPN’s.
This finally got me to start looking into them (as previously I had no idea what they really did), leading me down a rabbit hole of near infinite choice.
There are absolute scores of different VPNs to choose from with varying prices, features, OS support, and public opinion.
I’ve been trying to narrow it down, but it’s been difficult, as it seems for every person that says something good about a particular VPN, there’s another one to say it’s terrible. And oftentimes it’s blatant that one or either side are clearly associated with a company, and are just trying to promote themselves or demonize their competition.
/r/VPN also seems to suffer from that issue, and I’d rather get a feeling for what Linux users prefer. So the question is:
What VPN are you using?
What would you recommend, and why?
Which VPN’s have you had a bad experience with?
Have you tried gaming online with it, was your ping acceptable?
Mod of /r/vpn here. Affiliate partners of VPN companies troll around just waiting for this question to be asked.
Be skeptical of “recommendations” you receive here. You can do research for a suitable service based on your needs and threat model using our sub’s Comparison Chart
I use PrivateInternetAccess. It’s relatively cheap, they seem to value users’ privacy, and it works well for what I do (which isn’t much more than web browing and the occasional torrent). I’m happy with it.
I use their service with the built-in NetworkManager VPN tools, not PIA’s own software (which I could never quite get to work right). They have various servers across the USA, which is nice for getting a low ping when I travel.
I don’t have any connection with them other than being a happy customer
I’ve been using AirVPN for over a year now and have no complaints. Being able to select your ports and protocol are really nice for customizing your connection. They also give you access to 20 ports for forwarding, and even have the option to spit out 20 contiguous ports. This is great for making sure my torrent client performs optimally and allows me to host a number of services behind the VPN.
I’m using a self-hosted OpenVPN install on a rented server. Can’t say I’ve had any major issues with it that weren’t caused by my own stupidity (and one day where the entire data center went down because of an upstream network problem).
IPVanish. I haven’t really tried any others (besides the DNS filtering ones to get around content blocking that always seem to be flakey for me), so I can’t really compare/contrast, but I’ve had no issues with them. I set up an openvpn service with a bunch of their conf files and just enable whatever one I want to use. They have like 40 different countries, and bigger countries have different cities you can choose from. Never tried gaming online with it. I mostly use it for privacy/security when I’m not at home, or accessing different countries content on providers websites (mostly NFL Gamepass).
Private internet access, I’ve used it for the past year and a half and it serves me well (especially on campus where torrenting ports are generally blocked)
doing as I did, if you have the tech knowledge. I payed $5/month and could move it around the world as i pleased. also, since I controll the server (as much as one can with VPS hosing) it’'s safer that trusting someone else.