Other VPNs we’ve tested
Private Internet Access (PIA) The VPN space has a long history and in the face of actual criminal activities, it also maintains a record of defending user privacy. In 2016, Florida filed a criminal lawsuit against Preston Alexander McWaters. The McWatts were eventually convicted, Sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators traced the online threat to PIA’s servers and summoned the company. As Complaint Reading“The subpoena was sent to [Private Internet Access] The only information they can provide is that the IP address group used is from the East Coast of the United States. “According to the complaint, McWaters is engaged in several other identification activities, but PIA has not seen VPN providers stick to their untouched policies, but in my tests, I didn’t bring me a lot of speed. My speed is 15.6% of that.)
Mysteriumvpn As far as I know, it is the preferred DVPN or a decentralized VPN. The concept of decentralized VPN has been around for some time, but it has indeed received attention over the past few years. The idea is to have a network of residential IP addresses that make up the network, route traffic through normal IP addresses to get a list of blocks that are increasingly common to VPN servers. Mysterium uses Mystnodes to complete this network. This is an encrypted node. People buy nodes that earn cryptocurrencies and put them into the mysterious network. It’s not bad by nature, but routing traffic through a single residential IP is somewhat worrying. Even without a decentralized kick, Mysterium is slow and has no privacy material of any kind, whether it’s a third-party audit, warranty canary or transparency reports.
Privadovpn It is one of the popular choices recommended as a free VPN. It offers a nice free service, with a small amount of full-speed server and 10 GB of data per month. You have to suffer four (yes, four) and beg you to pay before signing up, but the free plan works. The problem is the new Privadovpn. There are no transparency reports or audits available, and despite the good speed, they are not as good as Proton, Windscribe or Surfshark. Privadovpn is not bad, but it’s hard to recommend when the presence of Proton and Windscribe has the same good free plan.
How we test a VPN
Functionally, VPNs should do two things: keep the internet speed reasonable and actually protect your browsing data. That’s where I focus on testing. The extra features, comfortable UI and customizations are great, but it doesn’t matter if the core service is broken or not.
Speed tests require point checking, as the time of day, the network you are connected to, and the specific VPN server you are using, will affect the speed. So, before recording the results, I always set the baseline speed directly on unprotected connections and I tested three times on US and UK servers. As these baselines fell, I checked at different times of the day to see if the speed drops were similar.
More security. For beginners, I checked for DNS, WEBRTC and IP leaks every time I used a browser to leak to connect to the server. I also conducted a brief test to sniff my contact Wireshark In order to ensure that all sent packets are used, the VPN protocol is ensured.
In terms of privacy, the highest applied services included in this list have been independently reviewed and all maintain some kind of transparency report. In most cases, there is a proper report, but in other cases, such as Windscribe, transparency is exposed through legal procedures.
