Buy European

Port forwarding sucks on PIA. You need to have a script running that times out every other week, which means you have to restart it and it will assign a new port that you have to set in your torrent program. It's a pain.

I switched to Airvpn which has been perfect. It's based in Italy and seems very privacy focused. I'm using it with a few torrent servers and the speeds have been good enough for me.

Yes its pretty fast in my experience. When I had a 1Gbps fibre connection I regularly saw speeds of 28MBps (MB not Mb, so like over 200Mbps) downloads on steam (so from a single source), I don't recall what my max was when torrenting multiple large files consecutively, but for example a 1080p movie took like 45 seconds. Their compatibility with my docker setup on my server was pleasantly good after many failed attempts with other VPNs.

Mullvad sounded like a good option to me, both pricewise and privacywise, but was a non-starter due to them folding to Hollywoods pressure and disallowing port forwarding. Anyone who torrents without port forwarding and sharing back what they get at least 1:1 is a scab IMO.

Unfortunately I only have a (somewhat tenuous) mobile 5G data connection these days, but here is a fresh speed test result showing about 60 Mbps (Mb this time, not MB) while connected to AirVPN. I ran a few and they averaged 30-60Mbps. Exact same speeds without it on, but with slightly lower ping, about 85-90 ping, but surprisngly higher jitter around the 85-90 too when not connected 🤷‍♂️. You'll have to take my word for it that its similar speed without it connected since I don't want to share my actual IP results.

I believe speeds depend on which server you connect to, but they don't implement any throttling on their end, exept an even reduction in allocated speed if a single server's connection becomes saturated. For example if everyone in one region decided to connect to one specific server, it may saturate its network connection and everyone's share of the total bandwidth would reduce. (I personally have not seen this happen, or anywhere near it on any of the servers I regularly connect to). I believe normies that use their default app (Eddie) have access to better features like automatic server switching so I imagine they prevent this from happening with some sort of load balancing.

Thanks. I have been working on it for a while. Always good to hear that it's useful.

Yep, but I was just posting them in order that they appear as preferable alternatives for that site.

Nord, express, surfshark and others after all owned by the same company, they have been accused of stuff in the past. They also own most of the VPN review sites so put their VPNs consistently in the top 5.

Mullvad would be the best at €5 per month and as mentioned then proton.

I seed all my torrents to a ratio of 1.10 and I'm on Mullvad, so clearly someone out there is benefitting.

Nah, I auto remove torrents when I seed to 3.0

Mullvad works for me because in my country the torrent sites are blocked, but not the protocol. I just need the vpn to get the magnet links and then I switch it off.

I know, I did some research before using a coupon from a youtuber, but before i did i just had an expectation based on their name and logo and all. Maybe i am the only one and i didn't have to write that, maybe I'm not and somebody might skip over Surfshark because of their branding.

Oh yes I see that now, I remember using port forwarding extensively before 2023, but I was not aware of its removal. What a shame /: