Any good, free VPNs or Proxies?

[SweetErika]

We need a good VPN or proxy service for occasional torrenting. My husband is concerned about free services of both types collecting/reporting our info (for profit and/or legal reasons if pressed) and putting ads on our browsers and such, so he's leaning toward a paid service. I'm hoping my fellow members can point me toward a good service that is free or less than $50/year for a proxy, or $100/year for a VPN.

Has anyone had particularly good experiences with certain free/cheap VPN or proxy services?

Fair warning: I'll see what my fellow HT'ers have to say first, but I may cross-post this to the GB, if necessary.

 

[littlecordelera]

VpnBook is a pretty good free service, but at times, you will have to jump around the various connections to find a fast (enough) one. There are no speed caps or download caps on free accounts. Setup is rather complex (I had to get help). Paid accounts are fast.

CyberGhost is fast, but it has a download cap of 500 MB for free accounts. I think paid accounts are about $50/year, but you would have to check. Setup is a piece of cake. Install and go.

 

[Bramblethorn]

We need a good VPN or proxy service for occasional torrenting. My husband is concerned about free services of both types collecting/reporting our info (for profit and/or legal reasons if pressed) and putting ads on our browsers and such, so he's leaning toward a paid service. I'm hoping my fellow members can point me toward a good service that is free or less than $50/year for a proxy, or $100/year for a VPN.

Has anyone had particularly good experiences with certain free/cheap VPN or proxy services?

Fair warning: I'll see what my fellow HT'ers have to say first, but I may cross-post this to the GB, if necessary.

I haven't tried others to compare, but I've been pretty happy with Tunnelbear. Regular price is $60/year for unlimited usage, though it's currently on sale for $50. The free trial version gets you 500MB/month and if you're on Twitter you can triple that by plugging them once a month. The app is user-friendly, one license covers 3 devices, and you can tell TB where you want to appear from so you can get around things like region-blocking.

Also the site is full of bears, and who doesn't like bears?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Unless you're torrenting (is that a word?) 24/7 I really don't think you have to worry about someone knocking on your door.

If you are really torrenting occasionally, then just use a free program called Peer Blocker to keep the noisy P2Ps away.

But if you are a 24/7 torrent user, then yeah, use a proxy and VPN.

 

[SweetErika]

Unless you're torrenting (is that a word?) 24/7 I really don't think you have to worry about someone knocking on your door.

If you are really torrenting occasionally, then just use a free program called Peer Blocker to keep the noisy P2Ps away.

But if you are a 24/7 torrent user, then yeah, use a proxy and VPN.

IDK if it's a word or not, but it comes up on a bunch of google searches and torrent sites, so I decided to give it a go.

No one's knocking at our door, but I did DL the latest seasons of The Newsroom and Homeland recently, and we got a copyright violation email letter from a company contracted by our ISP because of that. Fortunately, our ISP has a 6-strike rule. We've never had an issue before, but I think they're cracking down far more this year, as evidenced by the recent police raids/shutdowns of sites like TPB and additional court rulings here and in Europe. Hubby DLs A LOT of anime from AngrySubs and similar sites, but apparently the Japanese feel differently about (re)distributing such material.

We decided to try the free FrootVPN for now, but I'm sure we'll switch to a paid service at some point. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[Zeb_Carter]

IDK if it's a word or not, but it comes up on a bunch of google searches and torrent sites, so I decided to give it a go.

No one's knocking at our door, but I did DL the latest seasons of The Newsroom and Homeland recently, and we got a copyright violation email letter from a company contracted by our ISP because of that. Fortunately, our ISP has a 6-strike rule. We've never had an issue before, but I think they're cracking down far more this year, as evidenced by the recent police raids/shutdowns of sites like TPB and additional court rulings here and in Europe. Hubby DLs A LOT of anime from AngrySubs and similar sites, but apparently the Japanese feel differently about (re)distributing such material.

We decided to try the free FrootVPN for now, but I'm sure we'll switch to a paid service at some point. Thanks for the suggestions!

That's because you didn't use Peer Blocker also, hiding behind a couple of firewalls helps. My ISP is AT&T and I have never, ever received a letter from them about what I download. And I download(torrents) a lot of stuff.

Just last night I downloaded Lucy, Predestination, I Origin and The Equalizer. Any queries from P2P bullies were blocked, by Peer Blocker and/or my firewalls.

 

[NightL]

Good overview/comparison
How to Stay Anonymous - A Guide
http://www.reddit.com/comments/whg1n/how_to_stay_anonymous_a_guide/

PeerBlock (formerly PeerGuardian) requires constantly updating of lists as found at https://www.iblocklist.com/lists.php. Many torrent applications have IP filtering options built in, where you can import lists found at iblocklist. qBittorrent is one such example http://sourceforge.net/projects/qbittorrent/ - this one is opensource and advert free, also has a built in search facility for torrents accessing many common torrent sites/lists. The search bar is installed/found under the View menu (requires python installed for search to work - https://www.python.org/downloads/).

Treat PeerBlock as one element in your protection, it is not foolproof. PeerBlock may well block many useful peers. While running, PeerBlock may impact on your general browsing. I doubt PeerBlock alone would have much impact on agencies that are dedicated to tracking the downloading of copyrighted material. I have read that PeerBlock does as much service to the prevention of file sharing, by blocking unnecessary IPs, as it does to protect it.

Free VPN and proxies will likely be very slow

__edit________________________________________
More info on qBittorrent
Anonymous mode
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/Anonymous-Mode

Additional Search Engine plugins
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins