First off, sorry if this has been asked a million times in this community already, but the only post I found on this topic when I searched was over two years old.
I’ve been using PIA vpn for the past two years, but my subscription is ending soon and I was thinking about switching providers. I’m a fairly basic vpn user so I’m not overly concerned about advanced features and bells and whistles. I have a limited budget to work with, and I run Fedora os. Does anyone have any recommendations on what vpn I should be using?
I’ve seen Mullvad mentioned frequently, but it’s a touch expensive compared to others. I’ve heard some good things about Proton vpn too, but I know there was a controversy with their CEO not long ago. I’ve also just read something about IVPN and they look good, but I’d like opinions from more sources. I’m open too all other suggestions as well. Thanks for any and all thoughts!
How important is port forwarding? I’ve never really bothered with it. I’m definitely still in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to using vpns.
Seeding torrents will be next to impossible without it, especially for private trackers. It’s pretty vital for torrenting. Anything else, doesn’t matter.
I used Mullvad for a year and love the service, but they explicitly don’t allow port forwarding, so I recently switched to Proton. Their CEO’s comments last year still feel disgusting and I trust them as a company far less than I trust Mullvad as a result, but the service they offer is stellar regardless.
From what I understand, Mullvad is the top choice for a privacy-focused daily driver VPN, while Proton is the best choice for torrenting while still functioning just fine for daily use.
The only realistic answer is “it depends”. Torrents require at least one side to have an open port. If your port isn’t open, you’ll only be able to connect to people who have opened theirs. If everyone had open ports, you wouldn’t need to worry about it. But the reality is that many people don’t bother with opening a port, so your connections will be limited.
The issue will be much more apparent on smaller/less popular torrents. With popular torrents and hundreds of seeders, chances are good that some people will have an open port. But your speeds may be limited, because you can only connect to a select few. Even worse, torrents may stall entirely if there are only a few seeders, (and none of them have open ports). It’s super frustrating looking at a torrent with 3 or 4 seeders, but seeing that it has stalled.
There are workarounds like pinholing, but those are bodges that require specific circumstances to work.
IIRC it’s good to get faster downloads on BitTorrent, but I’ve never stumbled upon a torrent that was slow anyway.
It’s more of an issue with torrent seeding. You need to be able to accept incoming connections to seed, so you need a VPN/router to allow incoming traffic to a certain port to reach your torrent client.
So, not a problem for leeching, but if you are trying to meet ratio requirements, could be a big problem.
I haven’t even looked at port forwarding. I think maybe some ISPs in some countries might block traffic this way but others will know better. Everything just works with Mullvad on Fedora with Qbittorrent, so I’m happy.
It’s nothing to do with what ISPs blocking traffic it’s about being able to seed