I’ve used proton for a year or two now and it is fine. Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi and it sort of kind of works with gluetun (the rotating port is annoying but it still is a forwarded port).

But I’ve increasingly been annoyed with Proton as a company and am looking to migrate my email/domain to fastmail in the very near future. I COULD continue to just pay for the vpn (60 USD a year is pretty reasonable) but also feel like this is a good opportunity to “shop around”

Checked the wiki and other FAQs (which all basically crib from said wiki) and they all basically boil down to proton or mullivad… except that mullivad apparently stopped allowing port forwarding which is a bit of an issue for any torrents and the like.

So are there any other good options?

Thanks

    • kbal@fedia.io
      381·
      9 days ago

      The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

      • Lad@reddthat.comEnglish
        15·
        9 days ago

        What exactly does port forwarding do and why is it better for torrenting like I’ve heard? I’ve been using Mullvad for a couple of years now but if I could get faster torrent download speeds that would be great

        • kbal@fedia.io
          37·
          9 days ago

          Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you’d get more peers (which doesn’t matter if you’re just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.

          • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
            111·
            9 days ago

            And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

            • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              5·
              8 days ago

              Not all torrent sites require an open port. E.g. MAM works without an open port. It majorly impacts your ability to seed) but that isn’t a problem because of how much bonus points you get. TL does not either.

        • Nursery2787@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          One port must be open for a torrent connection to work.

          Down: open, Seed: Open = instant connection Down:closed, seed: open = connection takes a second to work Down open: seed closed = down has to wait for seed to renounce to trackers. A few minutes to an hour. Down closed: seed closed = no connection

    • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      AirVPN

      I have been a happy customer with them. Not a fan of their GUI Client, but you’re not required to use it. Very easy to share access with friends too whenever they need it.