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Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

#13

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

tricinel wrote: post #8

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/ .

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

#17

Post by 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

Re: Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

#18

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

rtfpessoa wrote: post #4

https://www.mullvad.net/ seems like a great option, anyone tried it?

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best VPN provider?

#19

Post by bradknowles »

remlov wrote: post #17

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 Brazi…

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.

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