My NordVPN 3-year sub is about to expire. What providers are you guys currently using? No I don’t want to maintain my own, part of the reason I like having a VPN is for regional presence 
Calling @Ympker, the resident VPN comparison king 
As for me, I’ve used PIA and NordVPN the last few years and been satisfied with those, though my actual usage and need for one dropped significantly during the pandemic, up to the point where now I don’t subscribe to one any more and only have one at home to connect to if needed when traveling 
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@Wolveix VPNUnlimited is probably my favourite lifetime vpn (which is currently on sale for 100$ instead of 200$: Buy VPN Unlimited: Best VPN Subscription Plans / Lifetime ) and if you had the money, I’d pick it up, regardless of use case. It’s what I replaced my NordVPN sub with.
Now, for streaming and regional unblocking, Ivacy (although they discontinued selling lifetime) would be my recommendation. About 6-7 Flix regions and lots of streaming services they unblock (in app or browser extension). They are still offering 5 years for 1$/mo which is a very affordable price imho. They also added Wireguard recently which improved speeds by a lot.
https://www.ivacy.com/features/
Video of the App with streaming locations (pw is “hostballs”):
https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZE5djZaa6jrdQP8KRu1ErpuHWFTfm4X74y
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Appreciate the info! I don’t particularly care about streaming or circumventing Netflix’s region protection (as I don’t use Netflix). VPNUnlimited look interesting, though I don’t see a clear explanation of their server/bandwidth speeds/allocation. Vould you shine any light on that? 
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Ah, gotcha. Unfortunately, they don’t display any public info about live bw usage of each server (like e.g. AirVPN does), however I believe (never paid it any attention) that the green/yellow/red bars indicate current server usage as it most definitely isn’t the indicator for Ping. Otherwhise green Australia 774ms ping would be odd.
If you have any specific questions, shoot them an email. They’re usually very quick to reply
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Sorry, I meant the average throughput expected when connected to their servers , and whether they imposed a bandwidth cap I saw a review from someone that their connected dropped from 30mbps to 10mbps while in-use
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Ah, right. My bad. Usually, I can almost max out my line 250/40 down/up, but when I was living at my parents still, where we has 1000/25 down/up, I was getting 400/500 Mbits download, so I think it depends on your max internet speed, too. I’d assume if I had 500/50 in my new flat, I’d also get around 80-90% which obviously would be way more then. According to my spreadsheet, Debaser from LES measured 400 Mbps on it. Regarding drop of speed, I never experienced smth like 30 mbps dropping to 10 when using Keepsolid. I never measured it either, though. It just always worked to my satisfaction
It’s also hard to replicate in the 30 to 10 case, because speed may have also been limited/dropped as more people were connecting to the same location/node to distribute fairly among everyone.
Out of Keepsolid, Windscribe, and Ivacy, Keepsolid gives me the best speed and most stable connection 90% of the time (to put it this way). This is just me (a single user), though.
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Awesome, really appreciate your insight! I mean for $100 one-time, it sounds like it’ll be more than worth it I get 900/110, so should be fine
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Bought it in 2016 and haven’t looked back It’s been on stacksocial for like 40$ for many years now, but they recently removed lifetime deal there and now just sell through their official website (200$, 99$ atm), so by all means, go for it!
They also got more lax on their device limit policy which, originally, only allowed removing one device per week, so if you had all 5 slots full, it’d take some time to register new devices.
Now they have this:
To remove an unused device, log in to your User Office, press Manage for KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, and navigate to the Devices section. There you can view the list of all your devices in use and manage them manually.
Note: You may remove the first 5 devices without restrictions monthly. After that, you will be limited to removing 1 device per day for a month from the date of the removal of the first device.
Native Linux Gui app is also nice
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I went with Mullvad last year, it’s one of the best in terms of privacy (they even allow you to mail cash to them). They were raided recently but since they have no user data, nothing was shared with the authorities (source).
It’s relatively cheap (€ 5 / month), allows port forwarding and up to 5 connection per user. I do have a VPNUnlimited subscription I picked up for 10$ or so a while back and it’s been solid, but performance wise it’s not as good for me (sub-10 Mbps speeds most of the time from their more popular servers in NL/DE, which is just not good enough for me).
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Mullvad is probably one of the best regarding privacy, along with IVPN. OVPN also has quite the good reputation in that regard.
Fwiw, I never felt I needed that level of privacy from a provider which, along with the fact that as a student I prefer to avoid recurring subs adding up, was the reason I never ended up choosing any of those providers. No doubt they are doing a good job, but e.g. for streaming purposes (and unblocking) I read mixed reviews about Mullvad. This would be an aspect that would be more important to me than privacy with a VPN provider, as my use case is 99% streaming/unblocking related. This is also, why for streaming 1080p, I don’t really care whether I get 500 Mbit/s throughput (I don’t have that from ISP now, but in theory) or 100 Mbit/s from my VPN provider. For streaming 1080p, both are more than sufficient.
As for Keepsolid DE location, I can’t say anything as I basically never use DE locations with VPNs (due to unblocking/streaming purposes). I usually use Spain, Switzerland, and USA which have been stable for me.
Edit: I also read about the raid, and there was some funny comment below the newsarticle, where someone said that’s why german authorities would love 10 years data retention laws, because right now they don’t have the means/personell to track down people in time. Once the police arrives, all data is long gone, as this often happens months/years after the incident. Internet is “Neuland” in Germany, afterall
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I can’t say it’s the most important factor for me either, but it’s a nice addition to their service. For me the most important thing is speed/latency and uptime, and a decent number of active connections (since I’m using Docker containers to route traffic from different services through different countries). I haven’t used Mullvad for unblocking because I don’t do Netflix.
With Keepsolid, and any VPN really, I chose the location closest to me to reduce latency and improve speeds. Switzerland would be fine but that wasn’t really performant either last time I checked, nothing in Europe was performing > 20 Mbps. 10 Mbps isn’t quite enough to stream 1080p content on a decent bitrate, that’s why I’m no longer using VPNUnlimited. Speeds were dropping to 1 Mbps at some point (maybe I was speed limited because of my data usage which was roughly 10 GB at that point)
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Ah, I can see why it would be beneficial in your use-case. Mind telling me, what/why you are routing traffic around through various Docker containers? Is it Plex related? If you don’t feel like replying in public, feel free to pm
Yeah, for me it’s all about unblocking/streaming, cheap shopping, really.
Sounds like you’ve gotten worse speeds, then. That sucks 
I’m always confused about Mbps and Mbit/s, but my unmetered LTE mobile plan has 10 Mbit/s and can stream 1080p without issues, so 100 Mbit/s is normally (on laptop,pc) enough for me to stream 1080p. If 10 Mbps is less than 10 Mbit/s then it might indeed stutter when streaming 1080p. Or it depends on the streaming service, perhaps.
@Wolveix it seems @Solaire had quite the different experience than I had with Keepsolid, so take what I said with a grain of salt. What works for one person/use-case might not work for another. Fwiw, Keepsolid states on Lifetime VPN Subscription – VPN Unlimited
I want to buy a Lifetime VPN Unlimited plan, but could I try it before purchasing?
Yes, sure. If you’re hesitant to buy a Lifetime VPN deal right now, you can always try it risk-free: there’s a 7-day free trial + 30-day-money-back-guarantee.
So, in case it won’t work out for you, you can apparently refund the first 30 days
From EUA: KEEPSOLID, INC. - End User Agreement
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, we also offer a refund for a period of thirty (30) days after your initiation of a Service subscription for all subscriptions.
For clarity: (i) for non-recurring subscriptions, we offer a refund for a period of thirty (30) days after you subscribe for the particular Service subscription (and pay the applicable Fee)
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Geo-unblocking (and one container for torrents). Since the piracy scene does not always provide me with what I want, I wrote my own tool that can download shows from several broadcast networks readily available in other countries (hence the use of VPN), sort it’s encryption and store it on Plex. This way I don’t have to switch between streaming services and VPN all the time but rather just rely on Plex.
It depends on the bitrate 10 Mbps is usually enough, provided the bitrate of the 1080p content is lower than 10 Mbps. There’s certain services (e.g. Amazon Prime) that have high bitrate content (~ 14 Mbps IIRC). Of course Plex can just transcode it to a lower bitrate, but I still find 10 Mbps to be slow.
@Wolveix if you want, I can just share my VPNUnlimited credentials with you so you can see for yourself
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To be honest for now my own top pick is mullvad, due to their audits and also server speeds.
The fact that you can open ports is also great and the fact that your account is a token.
I think a token system is way better than putting your personal info on such a service.
They offer 40gb/s in certain countries, and from what I saw their peering policy is really strict.
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40 Gbps is indeed really fast. Windscribe has some 10 Gbps servers, but I just never get good speeds with them. Allthebetter, if with Mullvad that works. To be honest, the past 7 (?!) years, I haven’t been trying any subscription VPN services (only been using lifetime’s), so I wouldn’t be able to compare myself. I agree, though. Even for streaming, I would prefer a token over personal info. Anyone would probably. You never know with data leaks becoming a daily occurance. HideMyName (former InCloak VPN) also uses tokens (but I doubt they are better than Mullvad; I also thought they were a Russian company before changing headquarters; might become problematic): https://hidemy.name/
I’m sure, the subscription VPN scene has changed a lot, too. I still follow VPN news (that’s why I also read about the Mullvad raid Solaire mentioned), but I’ve been actively avoiding recurring VPN subs as of 2016/2017
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That’s one thing I like with mullvad.
There is no subcription, they don’t care. It’s 5 euro, for 1 month, and if you want multiple month even one year it’s 12x5 euro.
I find it awesome because I only pay it when I need it.
Concerning speeds there are always decent, however I never tried using more than 1gbps.
But as always, there is a lot of choice in this market and it starts to become like linux distros, purely personal…
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I agree. That’s cool about them. For one, I assume many would love a yearly discount, on the other side it’s sending a message: “We don’t want to lock you in. We want you to CHOOSE us.”
Pretty nice
Fwiw, if I needed a token vpn, I’d just get a month of Mullvad, too. Or use HideMyName free trial (3 days, but works with throwaway mails so…).
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Mullvad, AirVPN, and IVPN seem to be tops for privacy. OVPN was just recently acquired by another company, so their privacy policies seem to be in question right now. Mullvad’s iOS app was getting pretty rough, with frequent disconnects and such, but the latest beta seems to have fixed that.
Oh, and Surfshark seems popular for opening up restricted streaming. They claim to have been independently audited, keeps no logs, all of that sort of thing. Multi-year plans are very affordable.
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This thread was good to see. Like @Ympker I’m seeing some slowness in Windscribe. Since I just re-upped for 3 years a few months back I’m a bit regretful, but oh well. I’ll add in that I generally have stuck with using Windscribe over lifetime offers that I own (KeepSolid/VPNUnlimited) and FastestVPN because of their Chrome extension’s ability to whitelist sites. KeepSolid barely updates their extension, and FastestVPN does update fairly frequently, but I don’t think their whitelisting is exposed to the user - they just allow LAN traffic through without going over the proxy.
EDIT: Last part was wrong. FastestVPN doesn’t seem to let LAN traffic through, basically killing it. I guess that was KeepSolid that whitelisted LAN traffic. Another point for them I guess!
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