I torrent (on the same PC that I run a Plex server from), but also auto connect on my devices whenever I’m on public wifi, so speed and avoiding blocks/captchas is also important. From what I understand having port forwarding will make a big difference in my torrent transfer speeds and ability to connect to peers.
I’m currently using Nord, but I’d like to make the switch to a company with a better privacy track record. I’m still really drawn to PIA because of the speeds and port forwarding, but I know their ownership is pretty sketchy, even if there’s nothing to point to there (yet). Mullvad dropped port forwarding, which seems to leave ProtonVPN. But now I’m hearing that the influx of Russian users post-invasion has increased the number of sites and services that block PVPN servers?
It seems like despite the huge amount of choices, nothing checks all the boxes except PIA. Am I missing something, or misinformed?
Does it not impact downloading? I thought the lack of port forwarding on my VPN was what was causing me to not connect to seeders even though qBittorrent shows them
No.
My (possibly mistaken) understanding is that during the download phase your client is contacting seeds requesting parts. Although the data is going to be incoming it’s still an outbound connection because your client initiated it, so you don’t need to be connectable for that.
It’s the seeding phase which is problematic because downloaders can’t contact you to request parts. That said your client will still contact downloaders and offer parts, which again is an outbound connection so you don’t need to be contactable.
In summary download speeds are uneffected, but seeding rates will be diminished. With most private trackers you can still satisfy seeding requirements just by keeping the torrent available for however long.
As an aside I use mullvad & wireguard. I’ve found wireguard dramatically easier to configure, particularly in a docker environment.