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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

VPN is a trust exercise, but, I’m sure if Mullvlad isn’t the best out there, they’re far from the worst.

They are not the best because they no longer support port forwarding. Their IPs are low quality and get you flagged as suspicious.

Which VPN provider doesn’t have their addresses flagged? I know a few offer “residential” IP addresses (for quite the premium), but as I understand it, these are a bit of a grey area and are also usually shared, so usually just a matter of time until they’re banned or flagged as proxy/shared/anonymiser.

The financial incentives for VPNs as they get bigger cause them to both put as many subscribers on the same IP as possible and to share IPs over the entire subscriber base. It's possible for a VPN to sacrifice profit to avoid being detected as easily.

Tbh between that and cgnat I'm kinda hoping that the entire ipv4 space gets sufficiently tainted that sites stop blocking by ip

Are you expecting a public IPv4 from a VPN?

Airvpn does it

Yep they are great! Wireguard support on Linux too

I'm happy Airvpn is rarely mentioned in mainstream vpn lists and don't typically mention them myself (sorry airvpn folks, but here's my apology) because I suspect its relative obscurity is in great part the reason it works so well. Not only reputation - it's technologically good too, supports all the payment methods, good prices, lots of exit points, no nonsense. I've been using them continuously for several years.

A VPN provider could easily support Port Control Protocol / NAT-PMP without giving each VPN client its own public IPv4.

Not a whole public IPv4, just one port on it (or a couple). And the public IP should change every reconnect.

Can recommend https://njal.la if you still need port forwarding.

how does it compare to mullvad?

One reason not to choose Njalla is that they changed their legal entity without (to my knowledge) telling anyone. THat's a bit of a red flag for me.

They were incorporated as 1337 Services LLC in Nevis (the Caribbean island) and recently it suddenly changed to Njalla SRL in Costa Rica. Looks like some guy wrote a post about it where he contacted them, they said "internal restructuring, nothing to worry about" and refused to elaborate further.

I know Peter Sunde (of TPB fame) founded it but I don't know if it has changed hands now.

Or proton

They had to disable port forwarding due to abuse and spam iirc.

Mullvad is one of the few that work in China today, any others? Or is it possible to run your own Mullvad server?

Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days

Which other VPN providers support the range of payment methods that Mullvad does?

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