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.
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.
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.
These do not by themselves result in a compromise of anonymity if Proton is trustworthy and the Swiss laws still enable them to disassociate your identity (given via payments) and your account usage, but regulation and governments tend to become stricter rather than looser over time and I would demand more from a service you are entrusting with all your internet traffic.
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.
I’ve been on AirVPN for about 12 years and I’ve never thought of a reason to switch off of them, great features for the price
Been using Nord mostly because of speeds and location choices. Cheap too.
