this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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I used Nord VPN after a lot of research when I initially started using them years ago. What have you heard about them?
Personally I don't trust companies who aggressively advertise like they do, but that's not a real reason grounded in evidence. It just tends to be correct. I recommend Mullvad.
They advertise aggressively because running a VPN is ridiculously profitable. I do agree with your apprehensive feeling, but at the same time their advertisements do make sense.
Right,but their YouTube ads also contain a bunch of misleading statements and outright lies about streaming services, privacy and military grade encryption.
They didn’t aggressively advertise when I first started using them like 6 years ago. I have yet to see evidence of their no-log policy being broken but it’s hard to trust most companies these days.
I feel like 6 years ago was the height of their marketing. Literally every podcast I listened to had them as a sponsor and maybe half of the YouTube sponsorships were Nord.
It is because of them most people probably now know what a VPN is, but I feel like their marketing budget is a hundred fold smaller than it used to be.
Nord had a very bad incident a few years ago https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/
They were also REALLY late to the disclosure and tried to play it off as "them being responsible":
They (at least were) also very aggressive about advertising (all over YouTube at one point sponsoring all kinds of stuff)... Which is typically the opposite of what you want.
Proton has had write ups in the past about the VPN review market as well and how a lot of reviews are "whoever pays us the most money is the top VPN." Proton has a strong enough track record in their other software for doing the right thing and truly valuing security, privacy, and open standards, so I'm inclined to believe them. VPN was one of the first spinoff products they launched when it was still mail, and they did so because some of their more sensitive customers (think journalists in some bad parts of the world) were having to rely on third party VPNs of questionable integrity.
I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.
Any reason you can state not to use AirVPN? I switched to them from Mullvad because they support port forwarding. So far I've been very happy with their service.
Having ads and sponsors blocked I can't be 100% sure, but I don't think they advertise at all. I only tried them because of a recommendation on Lemmy. Their site design is very old school which really says "run by nerds and not marketers" to me.
I do not know anything about AirVPN specifically.
Proton does provide port forwarding these days FYI.
I think "run by nerds not marketers" is a good thing ... though I don't know if a site looking old really means it's run by nerds lol
Yeah I know, but have you seen their site? It's like an old 90s static HTML page. The main thing I see is that it's clearly not a glossy "marketing first" service. They're surviving off of their actual product.
Yeah that's fair. It can definitely go both ways though. Like your sign over your shop can look old because you're still getting growth/a really nice cash flow without updating the sign or it can look old because you stopped caring a long time ago and you're just milking what you can from the remaining customers.
I had a friend who's ISP was very much in the latter category about a decade ago, charging like $90/mo for 10Mbps (IIRC with a data cap).
To counter some of the other comments, them being based in Panama is a huge plus imo, if you're inclined to do things deemed illegal by local authorities. They have no incentive to comply with government issued search warrants or the like. Most western country-based companies are legally obligated to comply with those requests, or even store information for a number of years. With quantum-based decryption there's no saying how long even encrypted data will be safe.
That was my rational too when I initially did my research.