TorrentFreak Overview of VPN Services and Anonymity Policies

TorrentFreak published an interesting survey in which they asked various VPN providers about what, if any, logging of customers they do and what legal jurisdiction the companies operate in.

Not surprisingly, the worst for logging were StrongVPN and VyprVPN. I’ve used both in the past primarily because I wasn’t doing any file sharing while using the VPNs, but rather was using them to avoid being spied on locally over wireless and wired Ethernet.

That is still my primary goal with a VPN service, but it is also becoming more and more difficult to determine what is and is not illegal to do on the Internet, even in the United States.

Using the TorrentFreak overview as a starting point I looked over the various options and finally settled on AirVPN. AirVPN doesn’t maintain any logs, and is surprisingly cost-effective — I paid just $21 for a three month subscription.

AirVPN is OpenVPN-based, and the connection speed is generally good. The difference between something like AirVPN vs. StrongVPN — aside from the excessive logging of the latter — is the difference in server choices. StrongVPN had numerous servers I could choose from in the United States. AirVPN has just two.

Personally, though, I never had a need to switch servers while I was using StrongVPN. I’ve never seen the servers at AirVPN at capacity or had any problem connecting, so they’re keeping their capacity at an appropriate level which is all I care about.

Assuming the next couple months go as smoothly as October went, I’ll be going for the year’s subscription which cuts the cost to $6/month.