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Comment by globisdead | Hacker News Reader

I'm on IVPN now as my primary mostly due to this chart and my only gripes are:

It's expensive compared to the others, at $100 a year. I've never seen it go cheaper than this in any sales of any kind.

Some sites like Google will mark you as a bot and force captchas for searches, probably due to its userbase and their shared IPs.

Comparatively fewer servers compared to popular VPNs like PIA and TorGuard. This leads to me getting the same IP address for each server I connect to. Not sure if this is a pro or a con.

Otherwise, speed has been good, connection has been stable (a few disconnects here and there but it seems to have smoothed out for now), and I hope the chart is accurate in terms of security and privacy on their part.

I've tested many others including AirVPN and NordVPN as well but haven't seen a definitive reason yet for the higher price tag on IVPN. Not that I'm not happy with IVPN, which I am, I'm just also an incredible cheapskate.

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In terms of security and speed, the two 'premium' VPNs are IVPN and VikingVPN. Viking also offers fantastic customer support, but my only gripe is that they don't run their own DNS servers (they use Cisco's OpenDNS). They also don't offer any exit nodes in Canada, but the company head (Derek) says it's because Viking is worried about Canada's data retention laws.

Likewise, I'm not affiliated with IVPN nor VikingVPN in any way. I think both are great choices.

Viking seems much more limited—and is US-based, which creates its own problems.

IVPN does look interesting, so I’ll have to re-review them… I’m still on Freedome’s trial, and it’s been working stellar including comparable speeds. Exit nodes in certain countries are also an important factor in my consideration, admittedly.

Multihop. Not many offer that. Insorg does, and it's even more expensive. Also CryptoStorm, but they're new, and come off as rather crazed. Others?

From what I've tested, NordVPN has "Double VPN" servers: https://nordvpn.com/servers/

And AirVPN has Routing servers used for double-hops: https://airvpn.org/status/

Right. Thanks :)

Not that I'm promoting any of them, I have my specific gripes with each of them as well.

NordVPN for instance has a ton of servers yet doesn't label the regional locations for them in the OpenVPN filenames. They're just labeled US-1 to US-339 and I ended up having to add random configs and hope it's one near my area. Their server map isn't accurate either and doesn't show all of them.

AirVPN I'm concerned with their user logging as they have this hub area for the community that reveals your username and when you're online as well as how much data you use and have a rankings for users or servers that use the most data each day/month. There's a log in anonymously checkbox but it's still a bit worrying to me.

I trust AirVPN. It's pretty typical for forum software to show when users are logged in. That has nothing to do with the VPN service. They do show VPN throughput for top users. That's a marketing thing, I think. And I'm pretty sure that users need to authorize having their names appear.

I also find NordVPN's labeling to be very confusing.

this is the biggest problem for NordVPN for me as well. Loading their configs in Linux is a bit of a pain.

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