Hello, I'm new to all of this. What should one be looking for in a VPN? Is there a certain VPN more people recommend than others? I guess I'm just not really sure where to start here.
Proton is a good service, but their years of reluctance to include more anonymous payment methods such as Monero and the inability to register an account from an anonymous IP address without a phone number makes me question the relative benefit of using them as a VPN.
You should be looking for a VPN with port forwarding support if you're going to be torrenting. Good speeds, good prices and robust privacy practices are just as important as well.
I personally switched to AirVPN after Mullvad discontinued Port Forwarding support. It fit all the criteria I was looking for, and the 20 forwarded ports are really convenient if you use more than 1 P2P program.
I have used: SaferVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad and ProtonVPN.
In my experience, Mullvad is great, I don't require port-forwarding as I have a seedbox, so the recent changes have not been a problem for me.
I have only use the free tier of Proton VPN, which is very good. Definitely a good candidate.
NordVPN was actually not bad for me; it gave me good upload and downloads speeds and offers several servers(from the US). NordVPN does not offer a free trial, so I would suggest not to sign up for a long-term if you are interest on it. It does offer Meshnet for free, tough, which could be nice to share in between your devices (I prefer Tailscape for that). I switched to Mullvad because of privacy concerns.
SaferVPN was my first one, I learned the hard way about killing switches with this one. Also, the speeds were not great, to say the least.
I use AirVPN, as it's run by privacy activists. From a technological point they might not be the best, but at least they believe in what they're working on.
If privacy is your goal, Mullvad is the way to go, IMO. We're lucky to have a handful of decent VPN options rn, but Mullvad is an excellent product at maybe too good of a price.
Idk how well it works for region-locked content, if that're your thing. I haven't used it to get foreign Netflix content or anything, but privacy/security-wise, it's excellent.
I use IVPN, mainly convenience as you can just pay for it for a week at a time. Also nice is you can make an account without email. You just get a string like an activation code.
If you're looking for a VPN for torrenting purposes just keep in mind that you'll get better download/upload performance by subscribing to a torrent friendly VPN that offers port forwarding. Unfortunately many VPN services don't offer that feature.