New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
I laugh hardly when I read the last two names of VPN...
Research needed urgently.
Windscribe, Mullvad, Keepsolid are pretty good choices.
VPS + OpenVPN + Wireguard
@raindog308 so which did you get?
hi.
can you recommend a installscript for shadowsocks?
To me VPS service levels have become all about how well they're maintaining the Korea servers. What's interesting is that price does seem to consistently match speed/service.
ExpressVPN gets a big thumbs up from me. It's the most expensive and fastest among the big boys that spend incessantly on Google ads and 50%+ affiliate commission rates.
NordVPN used to be decent a few years ago but I canceled when it went downhill. It sucked the last time I tried it. Probably can't maintain the service level at their prices while spending incessantly on Google ads and 50%+ affiliate commission rates.
I don't know if I should or shouldn't recommend PureVPN. They have all of 2 IPs in Korea, both under Psychz, it seems. But they're both geo-blocked by the biggest streaming sites and slower than ExpressVPN, obviously. I have been asking for a refund for the last 6 days, and support keeps trying to "help" once a day instead of refunding me. The good thing is that I was only treated like a total noob for the first 4 days. The last 2 days, they are finally trying to do things on their side with input from me. Problem is, I'm on the 31st (and last) day of the money back guarantee, so have had to give them an ultimatum: "officially extend my money back guarantee or refund me ASAP". And no, I'm not using their bandwidth during this period, in fact I've used less than 200MB in 31 days, because the streaming sites are geo-blocked.
ExpressVPN works well. Mudfish is a far pricier backup option for when the football game is about to start and mainstream VPNs are all overloaded. Self-hosted Outline on Lightsail works great, too, but for some reason it sometimes needs a reboot.
Keepsolid need to change sometimes change of ip to check if security if working as it should be or access sites that block EU due to GPDR or run some tests for Video ads and sometimes it is easier change ip to see different ads...
Instead of shadowsocks, you can use Hysteria, server config is pretty easy.
I recommend Surfshark.
I think that there was no GUI app of Linux at present, but I think that it is a good option if it is still okay.
I went with Surfshark and for some time, about a year, their service was indeed good. But after experiencing ever worse connectivity I went away.
ProtonVPN & ProtonMail
Surfshark has been aquired by NordVPN anyway, afaik.
Thanks for the info. That might explain it ... (I've left NordVPN too years ago).
Yup. Just double-checked: https://nordvpn.com/de/blog/nord-security-surfshark-merger-agreement/
FWIW, I left Nord in 2017 for VPN Unlimited/Keepsolid Lifetime Deal (39$ at the time VS 80$ish NordVPN per 24 months). I haven't looked back. Keepsolid VPN Lifetime and Windscribe Lifetime are basically all I need. The additional VPN Lifetime Subs I have are nice to have, too. More of an "idle VPS syndrome" though.
Mysterium DVPN - no registration required low cost access to residential IP's great for geo blocked access. https://www.mysteriumvpn.com/ Hope this helps - I use this for streaming however I use wireguard on openVS server for day to day VPN.
I hope this helps someone - I am not affiliate of Mysterium or its software.
Ian
Yeah I don't hear too much about decentralized VPNs around here, but they seem like they'll be the solution to streaming in the future. VPN companies themselves may have to implement use of residential IPs for that purpose eventually.
Since this thread came alive again, I wanted to add my own very limited experiences. I have never tried any of the commercial VPN services, so I can't help there. All of my experiences with VPNs has been private or corporate setups.
There is someone in our family who likes our local professional baseball team. Free over-the-air professional baseball games have all but ceased, so we signed up for MLB's streaming service, the lowest cost way for our family member to watch the local team's games.
Over the years, the service got more and more restrictive about the local team's games. Initially, you could watch all games in real time. First they imposed a delay on home games, where you had to wait until 45 minutes after the game concluded before you could stream it, but away games were streamed in real time. We could live with that, although occasionally someone would forget to "unlock" a game after the time period expired. Next, they imposed a delay on away games, too. At some point the restrictions on viewing games for teams in your "local market" got ridiculous, especially considering the amount we paid to MLB.
Rather than signing up for a VPN, I found that the lowest cost commercial "fix" was specialty DNS services that help people work around local area blacklisting. I am not entirely sure how they work, but my understanding is that they return the IP address of a streaming server that is NOT your local area. Instead, the DNS returns IP addresses for streaming servers that will stream for teams in YOUR local area, because those teams are outside the server's local area. Somehow MLB does not detect this behavior and allows the streams.
To be clear: This is local area blacklist avoidance for sports streaming. It does not offer any privacy enhancement. The reason I am posting this is to share that it was the lowest cost solution that I found for this problem. I used two different DNS-type services and both worked without issues. I found many other similar services that I did not try.
VPN Unlimited, Windscribe and your own one, depends on the usage
Using KeepSolid. it works well with a good internet connection. Overall satisfied with the service
The problem is Residential IP blocks are very expensive.
These services are generally called "SmartDNS". Getflix was one of the first popular commercial ones. Blackout and regional restrictions is the main purpose. The good services will have additional smarts besides a simple DNS server to handle the countermeasures from all the different services.
One of the main reasons I got into VPS' years ago was to do split DNS so I could access HBO and the likes in Canada before we had HBO Canada. Back then, VPN's and broadband weren't as good so avoiding the VPN and just having a slightly further path to the video source was miles better. But it's also more hassle as it's a cat and mouse game.
Seconding this. VPN Unlimited, Windscribe, and FastestVPN/Ivacy as potentially third backup VPN. Self-hosted VPN with @Nyr script depending on the use-case.
Forget using a overpriced service, build your own.
@Ympker is correct
Get a Frantech-BuyVM VPS in the location of your choice
https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices/
then use this...
https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install
or
https://github.com/Nyr/wireguard-install
Keep running the script to create .ovpn files for as many devices as you want or need...Android, Ipad, Laptops, tablets, desktops, phones, etc.
If you don't know how to copy the device.ovpn files from the VPS and you're using windows just use WinSCP
https://winscp.net/eng/download.php
You can download the script and look at it line by line with any decent text editor to make sure no funny business is going on.
10+ devices for $20.00 year with the 512 slice, or the 1GB ram slice for approx $40/year
This is a great guide, but how do you snag a buyvm vps? I try every other month; they always out of stock.
I tried for quite a while and found the 1st-3rd day of the month is when they seem to be available. I went with Luxembourg to avoid 5 eyes. I just checked and as I type this the 1gb slice in Luxembourg is available.
This exactly!
Try https://buyvmstock.com or https://buyvm.hasstock.net