VPN recommendation?

[Carson Dyle]

I do some torrenting and have decided I'm finally going to use a VPN starting as soon as possible. I'm looking for recommendations of a pay VPN service, under $10 per month, if possible. I'll probably do a one or three month signup at first, to try the service.

Never having used a VPN, several things aren't clear to me:

-- Can a service be had that at that price that is capable of giving speeds saturating a cable connection of 60 Mbps or 120 Mbps?

-- Can the VPN tunnel(s) be set up on my hardware router/firewall (Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite), or must they use a software client? I'll be checking the Ubiquiti forums also about this.

-- Do you recommend tunneling all of your traffic through the VPN, or only traffic where you're concerned about maintaining anonymity?

Seems the speed would dictate whether or not you can tunnel all internet traffic. I'm not overly concerned about achieving full saturation of the link when torrenting, but it would affect whether I want typical web browsing or, say, email retrieval to go through the VPN.

 

[petyr_]

Hey!

I checked http://comparisonvpn.com with your needs and you should be pretty much good to go with any price wise.

Only few VPNs don't support torrenting such as Tunnel Bear, HideMyAss and Proxify.

1. Servers that state that they allow P2P torrenting usually are fast enough.

2. I think they require Tomato / DD-WRT to work (this is not my field, sorry!). But in general, yes you can set it up on your router which you should do as it covers all wlan devices too.

3. Yes, tunnel everything through. It's not illegal or even shady, it's safe, secure and handy! Besides half of your data are already using some sort of secured connections nowadays anyways.

 

[TuSpockShakur]

PIA is $40/year, supports P2P and can be used on several router firmwares such as DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT and AsusWRT. PIA also has a windows client and can be run on up to 5 devices including smart phones.

No router based implementation will be able to saturate a 60+ Mbps (OpenVPN) connection. The CPU simply does not have the power. I have a Netgear R7000 and it can do around 45Mbps at best and that is one of the most powerful consumer routers on the market. A PC running OpenVPN will have no trouble saturating the connection if the provider is not a bottleneck.

No, do not direct all your traffic over a VPN. There is no need to run game consoles, VOIP and many streaming media players over a VPN unless you are trying to get around geographic restrictions. The VPN will add latency to your connection.

I run PIA on DD-WRT and use policy based routing to send only certain device traffic out over the VPN. If the VPN fails, the traffic is blocked. It works great.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Great info. Thank you. PIA was one provider that I came across.

You say the router could be a bottleneck due to processing limitations. Fair enough. What about PIA itself? What kind of speeds could I expect through them?

 

[TuSpockShakur]

Personally I can vouch for only what I have at home and that is on a 10Mbps line. I get around 9.5Mbps over the VPN tunnel. That is saturating my line if you include the overhead. I have read of people getting 75Mbps with PIA, but that is hearsay.

They have a 7 day money back guarantee. It won't hurt to give them a try. Just start by using the windows client to get a baseline speed before trying it on your router.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Signed up for PIA and downloaded the Windows client. Can I assume that using the client software, all 'net traffic must go through the VPN, or is there some way to configure which services or ports use the VPN connection?

There's no way I'd want to use it for web browsing. The latency is pretty bad. The top speed I saw while downloading large files (via http, not bittorrent) was maybe 25 Mbps, but it was very inconsistent and very up and down. Normally, I can max out my connection at around 60 Mbps and peg it there for hours, if asked.

If the software can't be configured, I'll have to get it working on the router and see if I can limit it to bittorrent traffic, then see what kind of speeds I get.

 

[John Connor]

I use VPN.ac. They don't allow portforwarding which is good to hide your IP. They use a stand along client, not that Ruby.exe crap PIA uses. They have several advanced encryption schemes. I use OpenVPN ECC on port 443 which will look like standard SSL traffic to my ISP. VPN.ac will bypass China's filters. However their website is blocked in China. They have another website address to use in that case.

VPN.ac has P2P optimized server locations. So you would want to use one of those if using P2P.

You can use their DD-WRT client or WRT, etc.

They have a proxy addon for FireFox & Chrome so that only browser traffic goes through their connection and nothing else. Yes, using the VPN client means all traffic goes through the VPN. They even have an App that I use on my Android.

I pay $20.40/3 months.

Read this: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-see-if-your-vpn-is-leaking-your-ip-address-and-1685180082

 

[TuSpockShakur]

All traffic on the PC running the client is by default routed through the VPN. Try different servers. The one closest to you may not always be the fastest. Port based routing does not work very well and there are far too many destination IP addresses for that to even be another possibility. The best solution for torrenting behind a VPN is to do it within a virtual machine with mapped drives to the host machine. The space required for the virtual machine is minimal and once setup is pretty transparent as I use a web browser to manage the torrent client interface. When setup properly, the virtual machine has it's own IP address and that works very well with policy based routing on a dd-wrt router.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I just use a socks proxy for most of my traffic. You can get some cheapo linux box and SSH socks proxy everything.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Yeah, I played around with it last night for a bit and it looks like using the socks5 proxy in µTorrent may be the simplest thing for now. It appears to be much faster then going through any of the PIA VPN servers, too. I think I can get close to my full connection speed.

 

[bbhaag]

I use VPN.ac. They don't allow portforwarding which is good to hide your IP. They use a stand along client, not that Ruby.exe crap PIA uses. They have several advanced encryption schemes. I use OpenVPN ECC on port 443 which will look like standard SSL traffic to my ISP. VPN.ac will bypass China's filters. However their website is blocked in China. They have another website address to use in that case.

VPN.ac has P2P optimized server locations. So you would want to use one of those if using P2P.

You can use there DD-WRT client or WRT, etc.

They have a proxy addon for FireFox & Chrome so that only browser traffic goes through their connection and nothing else. Yes, using the VPN client means all traffic goes through the VPN. They even have an App that I use on my Android.

I pay $20.40/3 months.

Read this: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-see-if-your-vpn-is-leaking-your-ip-address-and-1685180082

I use them as well. I just resigned for their 12 month for $40 deal. Just all around happy with their services and their CS is top notch. Here's a conversation with CS when I had a billing issue using bitcoin.

Hi

Below the details we got from :

Paid Amount:
Invoice Amount:

The price on the invoice was adjusted by on our request from 15.60 USD to 15.57 USD to reflect the actual amount paid. There was probably some fee to cause the difference.

ME:>Do I owe any more on the balance for my account?

yes, 3 cents. If we were a bank, we'd probably even apply interest on those 3 cents. But hey, we are not a bank so we obviously don't care. It's all good

Have a great weekend!

Regards,

Liviu F.

 

[TheJediMaster]

1. More or less, every VPN will decrease your speed.

2. You cannot configure a VPN on the router provided by your ISP, for any other router ask VPN service provider before buying the subscription.

3. If you tunnel only required traffic then you will be able to do the remaining work faster.

However, you may not need configuring VPN on the router. If you want to use VPN on multiple devices then many VPNs offer multi logins. My favorite VPN for torrenting is Ivacy (https://www.ivacy.com/torrent-vpn/), it offers 5 simultaneous logins and allow torrenting. I feel it easier to use than configuring a VPN on my router.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I ended up dropping PIA and getting a refund. I just couldn't get anything even remotely resembling my line speed. Even simple web browsing through the VPN was unbearable. The latency alone made it unusable. Turning off the VPN and only using the socks proxy for torrenting was very uneven. It would be fast for periods then it would slow to a crawl.

Still looking...

 

[ViviTheMage]

$10 a month? Just go to lowendbox grab a cheapo linux VPS, install openvpn. Most will let you pay with bitcoin, thus reducing your papertrail moreso, and you have a LOT more control of what's logged on your box. There is nothing to stop logging on the network the VPS is located, but I don't know of many places that do that sort of logging anyway.

 

[blackangst1]

I ended up dropping PIA and getting a refund. I just couldn't get anything even remotely resembling my line speed. Even simple web browsing through the VPN was unbearable. The latency alone made it unusable. Turning off the VPN and only using the socks proxy for torrenting was very uneven. It would be fast for periods then it would slow to a crawl.

Still looking...

Did you try different end points? For example, Im in Phoenix, and if I connect through the main east coast exit its literally 4 times faster than either the LA node or the west coast node.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Yes, I tried several different locations.

 

[KeithP]

I ended up dropping PIA and getting a refund.

I have used PIA for a couple of years now and that hasn't been my experience. Performance has always been great allowing me to stream video in high quality, etc.

-KeithP

 

[KMFJD]

PIA VPN doesn't seem to be working with US Netflix and BBC Iplayer and PIA has gone on record stating they are not supporting geo blocking workarounds.

/i just renewed last month

 

[John Connor]

Same thing for vpn.ac as well. https://blog.vpn.ac/netflix-blocking.html

 

[PliotronX]

Is NF trying to lose subscribers? Dropping most of its library and pulling this? I'm going to call it; 20:1 NF purchased by Comcast, Charter, or its nemesis Verizon by next year.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Why would you want to stream Netflix through a VPN, except to circumvent their regional licensing?

 

[PliotronX]

Why would you want to stream Netflix through a VPN, except to circumvent their regional licensing?

Verizon is why.

Oh and Charter was doing the same BS to SlingTV. These cable providers can't wrap their heads around the fact that their old models of charging out the ass is a dying market.

 

[John Connor]

Back some 8 years ago? There was a bill before Congress for a la carte cable channels. But we can't have a good thing it seems and it failed.

 

[blackangst1]

Not being able to stream Netflix isnt the VPN provider's issue....

 

[TheRyuu]

I use VPN.ac. They don't allow portforwarding which is good to hide your IP. They use a stand along client, not that Ruby.exe crap PIA uses.

You don't have to use that ruby crap if you don't want to. You can now use the stock OpenVPN client with strong encryption settings[1].

[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.c...stock-openvpn-with-strong-encryption-settings