Mullvad used to be great. But their stopping port forwarding makes torrents much worse. Their deprecation of openvpn sucks for me too. I have a couple usecases that need that. So I'm going to move to another one.
They still are great by any reasonable standard. Dropping port forwarding massively reduces the amount of abuse they have to deal with and only affects a tiny fringe of super nerds.
I still see tons of NordVPN sponsorship messages on youtube. I wonder if they've managed to pick up any good amount of regular people users or not. They sure do seem to be trying.
Pretty much every non-techy person I know under the age of about 50 uses VPNs for accessing regionally restricted streaming TV and sports[0] content, and getting around geoblocks (on US news sites that won't serve to Europe due to GDPR, trading/gambling sites, etc.).
I am pretty sure the sheer quantity of VPN ads on YT are also good evidence that they work and people are signing up. It wouldn't make sense to scale up a marketing approach to those levels unless earlier, smaller campaigns had positive returns.
[0] It's worth calling out explicitly the crazy lengths people will go to to both (a) find a free stream of a sports match; and (b) find a way to watch a match when they're travelling and can't access whatever service they usually watch it on.
I like NordVPN still. If there's any reason I shouldn't I'm all ears but haven't had an issue so far. I travel a lot and I definitely do feel better having my traffic routed through a VPN vs opening it up to whatever random entity happens to control the wifi I'm connected to, despite all the issues with them
I have nothing against NordVPN. I just generally agree with the statement that VPN users are either nerds or employees of companies that mandate it. But at the same time, I see Nord aggressively advertising to the general population - genuinely curious how successful that might be.
How long has it been like that? I've been torrenting via Mullvad for a while and occasionally low-seed torrents take a while to initialize but eventually I get them. Sometimes it means thinking ahead a few days for media that's more niche.
Mullvad did away with port forwarding about 1.5 years ago. https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forward.... If im not mistaken its not your ability to download the torrents that is effected but your ability to really upload the torrents. If you belong to a private tracker with a strict seeding to downloading ratio i would use another VPN service for that
If a torrent has no seed with an open port, a peer without an open port won't be able to download.
This means having no port-forwarding shouldn't be much of an issue on private trackers (because most people have it to improve their ability to seed) but on public trackers some torrents might not download.
Unless you were actively using port forwarding before it wouldn't be any different. If you need a VPN for your torrents, despite these faults I don't know of a better one myself. I use the Firefox VPN (which is Mullvad under the hood and it's worked at least as well if not better than any alternatives for me so far.
Yeah it's a really important feature for many people. Torrents just don't really work without it. Three quarters of peers are behind NAT or VPN so without port forwarding they won't connect. If you have some Torrents with only a handful of seeders it makes it really difficult.
With the availability and ease of use of Seed boxes, this feature is kinda moot. It doesn't even cater to power users any more because they've all moved to seed boxes a really long time ago. This just leaves semi-serious individuals that want to take the risk of torrenting on their private internet connection.
Yeah I'm not a big torrenter but sometimes I want an old show that is only offered by a few seeders. And then most of them don't work due to this.
If you just want to grab the latest blockbuster it's no problem no.
I've never thought of getting a seedbox, i always thought the amount of storage required would be prohibitively expensive for a VPS. Also, I'd still want to use a VPN so the VPS provider isn't the only protection layer.
You'd be surprised how much storage space these seed boxes provide for very little cost. And these things aren't VPSs anymore. They're glorified SaaS products that give you Netflix streaming in a box, for less than the cost of Netflix itself. I would recommend doing a "reddit" search on the topic and you'll find many many recommendations and ideas.
Personally, I do it because of the "Netflix effect". Movies and series don't exist if they're not on Netflix (or your chosen streaming platform). And with my kids growing up, I want them to see the good shows and movies I grew up with just as they share the shows they enjoy now with me. I can comfortably say that 99.9% of that media is never offered on Netflix.
Everyone wants to seed, so it's over saturated. Thus you won't be hitting the limits any time soon, and if you get close you just manage it with limits.
But to answer your question, for 25TB I've seen packages that cost 20euro, which is pretty much the same as what Netflix premium charges in the US.
I'm not gonna advertise them here. Next thing you know the wrong person takes an interest in this area of the internet and spoils it for the rest of us.
Trust me, I looked at the page of my provider just now and that's what they offer.
Too bad because they were good for a long time.