April 06, 2017   |   Read Online

VPN Recommendations

VPNs are becoming a major topic of conversation due to the recent removal of ISP privacy protections. There are hundreds of VPN providers out there already, and more are materializing every day—some for good reasons, and some for bad.

Given that reality, I thought it would be a good idea to assemble a short, curated list of my own. Basically, I took numerous resources like this one, and studied and parsed them down to five recommendations.

In short, you are unlikely to go wrong with any of these.

• Mullvad: OpenVPN-based, out of Sweden.
• IVPN: OpenVPN-based, lots of configuration options, including multi-hop.
• AzireVPN: Another solid OpenVPN-based solution, also with significant configuration options.
• OVPN.se: Yet another solid and highly-rated OpenVPN-based solution.

TL;DR

My current, personal recommendation would be to use Mullvad or IVPN if you want an OpenVPN/TLS option.

Notes

1. Considerations include things like: whether or not they log, whether or not they protect activists, known issues around business ethics, technical security, popularity among security professionals, etc.
2. If you have a recommendation on how to improve this list, definitely reach out and let me know.
3. I put the updated date here because these recommendations can expire, meaning a company that’s good one day could become bad the next. So it’s important to keep that in mind when selecting a provider where trust is such a key component.

Related posts:

1. You Should Be Running Your Own VPN Server
2. Everyday Threat Modeling
3. The Difference Between Business Intelligence, Reporting, Metrics, and Analytics