Whatever they have done today is messing things up big time, maybe it’s time to find another VPN to use when PIA isn’t working, this is unacceptable. (EDIT NOTE: This is not a quit thread, I will still be using PIA, but I want alternatives when/if PIA is not working. So save your fanboy downvoting for christmas, thank you.).
Any suggestions for alternate VPN’s is welcome.
EDIT: Here are the alternatives I have found so far, also found some that I cannot recommend:
1 SurfShark. So far this seems like the best alternative to PIA. Unlimited devices, basically same low price as PIA and safety in top too with no log policy and vpn leak protection. Although im still to figure out if SurfShark has support for command line utility, which is a very nice feature of PIA. So far I can only find command line for SurfShark for Linux, which is undesirable. So still not perfect alternative.
2 ExpressVPN, very pricey and only 5 devices. There’s a free program called Expresso on github that makes it possible to use ExpressVPN with command line interface. Though I’d rather have this supported natively in the program itself, like PIA.
I just spent a week trying to get NordVPN to work on my full wireless PC. I worked with their support changing settings, uninstalling my virus program and on and on and on… I was constantly finding NordVPN turning itself off for no apparent reason??? I worked with support for hours and days and then finally gave up. On one of my hard wired computers when I turned off all NordVPN settings and then uninstalled it I lost my Internet on that PC and nothing I did got it back except for restoring to a day before I installed NordVPN. I now have no interest in trying any other VPN service for a very long time. One of the things that I was looking for was access to my Amazon and Amazon Prime. I finally got PIA to do that now. I was just shopping on Amazon with PIA running full blast. Whew… NordVPN exhausted me…
Mullvad and airvpn are amazing, airvpn has a long list of documentation for the CLI application if that’s your thing. Switched from PIA years ago myself.
Just switched to Protonvpn. PIA was misbehaving for several weeks and my 3 yr term is up in 30 days. Very happy with Proton. Only drawback is for the $48/yr you only get two simultaneous connections. For me that generally will not be a problem.
Concerning NordVPN here is a reply I posted to someone else, but seems fitting also here:
Interesting. I had bad experience with NordVPN, they have many servers, which is a plus, but a good deal of them doesnt function properly unreliable connection and you can only find out which have this by testing each pinging google etc and once you found one that works well, at some later time it stops working well, and then you have to find a new one… ugh, never going back to that shit). Expensive and low max device limit, clunky huge interface and no command line interface. NordVPN is so not recommended for me at least.
btw do you know if wevpn has a command line interface for windows? This is something I really value about PIA. So far when searching for that for wevpn I can only find linux ubuntu about command line for wevpn.
Good question. Though it seems todays problem has been solved now (at least the issue went away on all my devices and is now working good again). At least the solution was fairly quick.
Thanks for the suggestion and information. If you only need one or two device connections and Protons reliability and safety is over the top, then I can understand the value for the buck for sure.
For me I need many more devices, so Proton probably wont be for me.
I was getting 1/10th of my download speed, whereas with Mullvad and Airvpn I get my full speed.
PIA also did not allow port forwarding on American servers which is a major issue to me as I like to host things through a VPN.
PIA also doesn’t allow you to choose ports to forward; nor does it let you have more than one which is an issue for some applications.
Mullvad has the same issue of not letting you pick specific ports to forward but it does allow you to forward multiple to the same connection. Not having the ability to forward specific port numbers causes issues with Unturned hosting which requires three sequential ports for example, Airvpn lets you choose specific port numbers which is nice.
The issue I had with Airvpn that made me switch to Mullvad is that the DNS server kept breaking after around 8 hours of connection time on Debian Linux, though that doesn’t seem to be a problem on Ubuntu; I just refuse to use anything other than Debian on a server.
Airvpn also has a load of really neat features, such as a built in DDNS so you don’t have to type in an IP address to access an application, instead you can type in something like torrentclient.airdns.org
Edit:
Airvpn also has a really great CLI client with plenty of documentation; Mullvad does not.
Mullvad and torguard just dominates those two. I wouldnt get expressvpn at all, also because of that hefty price of 8 dollars a month, where torguard is 2.50. Also, the ones you reccomened has no portforwarding, which is a must if people torrent.
Last I checked it was not working. Tried restarting the app and my PC. Tried a few of the only servers not greyed out and it was failing to connect. I submitted a ticket per the instruction on the app.
Wow, thanks for such a compressive response. I’ll be going over this for quite some time. So far I’ve narrowed it down to Mullvad, Airvpn and Protonvpn, but I’ll definitely be taking what you’ve said into consideration.