I guess it depends on what you're using your VPN for, but I prefer to run my own VPN on a vps. I use vultr and pay $5/mo. I also get to host a collabra server for my nextcloud setup on the same server so it just makes economic sense to use a vps rather than paying $5/mo (or more) to just get a VPN and also not have control of my data.
Are you guys vpn’ing on your phones too? Do you just use the built in vpn connection profiles? I’m having trouble getting mine to stay connected to a plain old IPSec tunnel running on my raspberry pi and thinking I probably need a special client for “always on” to work.
On iOS the only way I found for “always on” to work well was with the IKE protocol using the built-in VPN client. I set up a cheap Vultr VM and used this:
Cool. When I set my VPN up, Wireguard didn’t do iOS yet, but I’m interested in it. Please post back to this thread with a short experience report, if you wouldn’t mind. :-)
So far it's been really good. It's very good at staying on all the time and it was really easy to setup. Right now it's running on a raspberry pi but since I took down my ipsec vpn container, my ram/temp/cpu usage has gone down quite a bit.
I still need to spend a minute configuring things like dynamic dns in case my IP changes but I'm really impressed right now.
Btw, I also highly recommend a case cooling case for the rpi4. I got the aluminum one at https://flirc.tv but I think anything like it will do. It dropped the idle temperature by quite a bit. I think it went from ~75ish to about 45
The problem with this is that it quickly gets expensive when you have more than a little traffic. Most VPS up to 5$/month only include 1 TB, so if you need more than that you have to pay more.
Agreed - I consider it more of a general purpose VPN (and what I use personally). Streisand is more opinionated, in ways that folks that use Proton services might find appealing.
Flagging this. The VPN industry is full of companies competing against each other using underhanded social media tactics, astroturfing, bots, sock puppets, etc.
This is clearly one of them, just a shill for Mullvad by a likely astroturfing or affiliate blogger who is "not an expert in VPN".
There is zero reason why this should be on the HN frontpage.
It's just openvpn. If you dislike their app,use vanilla openvpn!
As far as instability..yeah it's unstable on the free version because you only get to access highly saturated free access servers.
With the paid plan on proton I see disconnects every othet day or so (random servers).
I use the free tier as well but I have it automated to where I force a reconnect if destinations are unreachable.
I believe proton uses Nord's infrastructure to some capacity?
But yeah,not fair at all to compare a free plan with a paid one. Even if they charge 1€/mo,those users are supporting the servers they use. With free,it's unlimited number of users that saturate a free server so you should expect less quality.
I used the visionary plan from ProtonVPN and ProtonMail. I personally have found it exceedingly good. I still augment it with my own VPN (easy enough to setup). I do experience slowdowns at peak times, but I also tend to break 30Mb/s speeds - can’t complain
> I am not sure if the problem is on ProtonVPN side or my ISP side
I may be missing something... but I feel this is a terrible article, not based on any facts/solid research, but based on random experiences caused by "who knows what".
I don't use ProtonVPN, but damn... The author starts off his article with "I feel (sic!) it’s getting slower and slower.". Well, what do you mean? Can't you measure the speeds? Are we supposed to take your word for it?
Even if he is right about protonVPN getting slower, that's no way of starting off an article...
On the second paragraph the author writes "Not only slower, but it also keeps disconnecting".. So, the author is sure that protonVPN is actually getting slower... But I thought he said he simply _felt_ like it was getting slower. Feelings are now equivalent to certainty, apparently.
Back in the day, every videocard manufacturer released their own drivers. Diamond, Canopus, BFG, etc, they all took the baseline GPU drivers and added their custom branding. This meant that after Nvidia released a new driver, it could take weeks before Diamond put it up on their website. You missed out on bugfixes and optimizations for new games. So everybody just used Nvidia's drivers, and eventually all the various companies stopped doing it entirely.
Mobile VPN apps are in the same spot. They all use the same backends; OpenVPN, IKEv2, and/or Wireguard. Everybody's time would be best spent making _those_ apps better. The OpenVPN iOS app has a particularly poor UX.
For example on iOS you use the iOS NEVPNManager API for setting up an IKEv2 VPN connection, if this is updated in an iOS release and you use it in your VPN app, your app will be "updated" too. So in this sense it's not comparable with videocard drivers from back in the day.
Was it a long time since you tried Mullvad? They revamped their UX making it easier to use not that long ago. And I use Mullvad on my phone following their instructions how to do so. This makes your post a bit confusing.
That's what I'm trying to do with WifiMask VPN, the apps are an important piece of the puzzle to make VPN as simple and clear to use as possible for the normal user. For now there's an app for macOS and iOS. A simple on/off button is the center of the design, with not too much bells and whistles. The focus is ease, security, stability and speed.
The big issue with VPN UX for me are all the ways that you can end up accidentally disabling your VPN, because it's not clear under which conditions it shuts down, is closed, or is temporarily inactive, which isn't good enough if you need 100% uptime for full protection.
Killswitches are the probably the easiest way to deal with it, because it will also alert users to when something is misbehaving, but it obviously doesn't work for general use cases so better UX is needed beyond the protective design.
With my WifiMask apps it's the case as long as the on/off switch is turned on, the VPN will either be connected or try to connect, as long as there is no connection the kill switch will do it's work, prevent data leaking and the app will show what's going on. Only manually turning off the switch will disable the VPN and any data leaking protections. I can still do some improvements here and there to show more information on what's going on, so this is useful feedback to me, thanks.
You mean (I think) it doesn't have it's own native app. Connecting to Mullvad's VPN works fine on Android using OVPN (as do many of the VPN providers).
Is anyone else bothered by the appropriation of the vpn term for setviced providing access to the public Web without confidentiality? There should be a new name for this.
In the past I used it for torrenting. Nowadays because it adds a layer of privacy from companies and governments. I trust my government now but I don't have to trust my future government. I am pretty sure I don't do anything illegally, but a future government might not think so.
Like in the UK when they wanted to ban porn (I think?). Something harmless today (legally speaking) can become an issue in the future.
The UK's Age Verification changes (not 'porn ban') has been delayed by another 6 months following some admin screw-up related to informing the EU. It's not really a very good example since it won't be illegal (for the consumer).
no, though that may constitute fraud depending on the jurisdiction. this is why some VPNs are based in certain countries, such as ProtonVPN in Switzerland. obviously they have to comply with a valid legal request, but depending on the data retention laws in the jurisdiction, there may be nothing to give over.
some VPNs definitely lie about logging, maybe most of them. ProtonVPN is one of the least likely ones to do so given their transparency relative to other VPN companies, their ProtonMail service, their infrastructure, and their founder.
upstream logging is still possible, and protonvpn is the only VPN service I know of with any of its own infrastructure. it has one datacenter in switzerland and you can use it as a proxy to some of its third party operated endpoints in other countries.
I was in France in May for the next to the last episode of Game of Thrones. Even though I pay for an HBO subscription, they still wouldn't let me watch it until I VPN'd into my nyc based server.
Primarily to avoid snooping when using various wifi hotspots out and about in the world and when using roaming data.
In addition to that, I don't trust my current or any of the previous governments, and I likely won't trust any future governments. I also don't trust any ISP in my country further than I can throw them, due to government-mandated logging. My workplace does mandatory MITM proxying and logs everything, I'm working on getting around that.
Protecting my privacy while browsing at work and on unsecured networks like coffeehouse wifi and when traveling. I have a gigabit connection at home so I just run wireguard locally. Works great.
Also many mobile plans throttle video to 480p, a VPN bypasses that.
To complement the list above, use a private vpn, hosted at home, to access devices and services which are only accessable from home, while being on a remote location. I use it to access my server environment.
We build our own WireGuard VPN servers to SSH to other servers. Aside from that, I personally use it to avoid ISP throttling and spoof my location, as @RandomBacon said.
I know people on it on Linux. They said it was pretty fast. They haven't griped about it any. It's possible the user's ISP or the Proton client software is causing it. It also might depend on which servers they use given more outages might happen in specific parts of the world vs others.