There’s way too much hype over VPN Providers, but do not forget, you are routing all your traffic through their servers
As a general advice, if a VPN provider keeps logs of your activity, does not allow you to pay with crypto, and generally spends way too much on youtube ads is probably not an ideal choice.
Do not follow any advice/recommendation blindly, do your own research on which one offers the best service for your own needs.
Mullvad used to be the no-brainer choice until they stopped supporting port forwarding. I kinda need it for seeding. ProtonVPN seems like a good idea for now.
I switched to Torguard and have gotten MUCH better speeds than I do with Proton and marginally better speeds than Mullvad. I had issues setting up port forwarding, but it was user error and Torguard customer support is next fucking level so I got that taken care of.
Overall, no complaints so far.
They also accept crypto payments, however there is an email requirement.
Been using TorGuard for 2 years. My only complaint is that there was this once they insisted it was a client side issue for one of the servers in my home country. I was so pissed off because it was slow and disconnecting all the time and only on that server.
Switched to Mullvad and loved it until port forwarding was removed… but now I’m back to TorGuard reluctantly. The customer support didn’t want to accept the possibility that their servers were going through some issues… didn’t even bother to check just because the server was online so it had to be client side but ever other server worked perfectly.
I find that weird that so many struggle without port forwarding… my seeding is going just fine without port forwarding.
You’ll be fine in public trackers without port forwarding due to the abundance of participants. In private trackers, it matters much more.
What is the difference exactly? Can’t tell if I’m missing something fundamental or what. In my head there’s no reason you’d run into issues
There’s no technical difference, but there are differences in practice.
First of all, in order to transfer any content, one of the participants need an open port. In case of public trackers, there are usually a lot of users, so someone will probably have a port open that you can connect to. Also, many don’t even realize that they have open ports, since routers can open them on demand by uPnP. For private trackers, since the userpool is much smaller, it matters more.
Also, for public trackers, you don’t really HAVE TO seed and maintain a good ratio. It’s the right thing to do, but is by no means a necessity. For private trackers, on the other hand, your account will be suspended in most cases if your ratio goes too low.
I ask because I am on several private trackers and haven’t had issues downloading or seeding using mullvad. By what you explained, it shouldn’t be working…
I might be wrong, but I think port forwarding is working for already set up ones till 1st July. Or maybe you have a leaking port through uPnP? Again, just possibilities, not sure. Or maybe you’ve just been lucky and encountered people with open ports.