HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

21 points by rtfpessoa ↗ HN
After the post by Bryan Krebs I started investigation what would be the VPN used by him.

The list suggested by him https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-vpn-comparison-chart/ has some interesting points. What do you think he is using? Also, what are you using and why?

20 comments

[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] thread
mtgx
AirVPN is pretty good. Modern crypto and uses OpenNIC DNS servers. You can lock the connection so it doesn't do IPv6 leaks and such. Clients are open source.
rtfpessoa
https://www.mullvad.net/ seems like a great option, anyone tried it?
Johnny_Brahms
Using it since a couple of years. They never seem to be the bottleneck, but it is hard to test since I am too cheap to get anything else than the lowest bandwidth (30/30). I get 2.2MB/s down and a bit less up, which is about the same as I get without VPN.

The app is nice (at least on Linux), but for environments where it doesn't work they provide openvpn files.

tricinel
NordVPN (https://nordvpn.com/). Panama, doesn't store logs, plenty of servers around the world. Works with the majority of devices out there. Accepts bitcoin. Checks pretty much all the boxes.

Also recommended on https://privacytoolsio.github.io/privacytools.io/.

ajeet_dhaliwal
This is the only one I've tried (and I'm currently subscribed) but one thing I've been disappointed by is the speed. I know this is something to be aware of when using any VPN so I am not sure how bad NordVPN is in comparison to others, it may actually not be worse than others, I haven't had to time to compare.
tricinel
I actually tried TrustZone as well and it was worse, at least for Germany. With NordVPN, I'm seeing speeds at about 60-70% of the original - which is a lot less granted, but it works fine for my day to day stuff like browsing or netflix.
[dead] willieaames
Yes, highly appreciated. But if you want to sort out VPN providers on the basis of those criterias, there aren't many left to choose from. I`v used many vpn providers in past mention in this review site: https://www.bestvpnprovider.com/
hbogard
I've used a bunch of small-scale providers because their servers aren't as hogged as the big guys out there (looking at you, IPVanish!) I found Hotspotshield and PureVPN mentioned on this list: https://www.bestvpnprovider.com to be somewhere between serivceable to trustworthy in this regard.
ionised
I use Mullvad personally
rtfpessoa
How long have you used it? What are the average/max speeds you get? Have you used any other before? How do they compare?
joshmn
PrivateInternetAccess. Lives up to the hype. Inexpensive; I picked up two years for $40. On my 250Mbps/15Mbps pipe I usually can pull down 200Mbps and push 10Mbps up.
remlov
I am partial to blackvpn.com. Cheap and they don't store logs. I did a couple armchair speed tests through a couple of their locations vs my baseline internet connection:

  NO VPN enabled
  http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6168457639
  PING 17 ms
  DOWNLOAD 195.94 Mbps
  UPLOAD 23.60 Mbps

  BlackVPN through Canada
  http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6168460690
  PING 53 ms
  DOWNLOAD 151.71 Mbps
  UPLOAD 16.48 Mbps

  BlackVPN through Brazil
  http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6168447144
  PING 160 ms
  DOWNLOAD 186.43 Mbps
  UPLOAD 10.21 Mbps

  BlackVPN through Switzerland
  http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6168451606
  PING 263 ms
  DOWNLOAD 19.93 Mbps
  UPLOAD 5.60 Mbps
bradknowles
With respect, I would advise using other speed testing sites. Speedtest.net is well-known to be optimized by most ISPs, and so doesn't really give you accurate results.

Fast.com is provided by Netflix, and you use their actual CDN to download a part of a freely available movie, and so you get a really good estimate of what kinds of download speeds you can see from them.

The other one I like is from dslreports.com -- it uses only HTML5 instead of flash, and they adaptively test your bandwidth from multiple simultaneous server sites, with adaptive multi-streaming.

You can't make a reasonable conclusion if you don't have reasonable data to work from, and with Speedtest.net you can't trust any of their results.