I wanted to do some soulseek, but just as I began moving towards that this happened. What VPN should I use for this ? I don’t want to use any of those over advertised shady VPNs like nordvpn (who was a spamming machine on my PC back when I used it) or surfshark or others if not necessary…
honestly you are going to be fine with most VPN providers. Unless you are one of the members of the very big scene groups, you are just seeding and your threat model is just to mask your connections from your ISP.
I personally suggest to use njalla. Few people talk about it but it’s a very very good provider, better than mullvad imho. Allows port forwarding, is transparent about legal requests and have a history of support with the piratebay. On top of that paypal denied payments to them for a period, and that is usually a good sign
I personally suggest to use njalla. Few people talk about it but it’s a very very good provider, better than mullvad imho. Allows port forwarding
That’s interesting, their website barely mentions any features about the VPN so I had assumed they don’t offer port forward. Just curious
- How many port forwards do they offer?
- Is it a static or dynamic port forward number? e.g. do they automatically change the number on you after x amount of time or does the port number stay the same?
- How do you configure the port forward on their system? Can it be configured on their website? Or must it be done via a VPN application they offer, or some other way?
Since my airvpn test month expired, I’ve just bought a Njalla subscription. Here are my experiences:
Pro:
- Payment via PayPal or cryptocurrency
- Same price as Mullvad (5€/month)
- Static IPv4 and v6, allows you to forward any port
- Torrenting just worked (including port forwarding)
- No VPN application, just use vanilla OpenVPN or Wireguard
- Does not throttle my internet speed (I only have 50MBit/s, so I cannot really test VPN performance. Definitely better than AirVPN though)
Contra:
- Requires E-Mail address/XMPP to create an account
- Only one client. If you need to access your VPN from multiple devices at the same time, you need to buy multiple subscriptions
- Only Swedish servers
Conclusion: for my usecase (Raspberry-Pi-based torrent box) Njalla looks great. If you want to use it on multiple devices or need to circumvent geoblocks, you should look for a different service.
Thanks for the info! If you just use vanilla OpenVPN/Wireguard with it then I’m guessing the port forwarding is something configured on the Njalla website, correct? That would be good news if true & opens up the possibility of setting it up on a router with port forward.
You do not need to set up port forwarding on the website. They give each customer a static IP, so as long as you configure your ip tables to allow port forwarding, it just works on any port. QBittorrent worked out of the box.
Here is the VPN setup page of Njalla. As you can see, it looks just as spartan as the public-facing parts of their website.
Gotcha, that makes sense now. Some VPN services do sell a dedicated IP in which case yes you can basically open as many ports as you like since they are all forwarded. That’s great to hear, they’ll definitely be on my VPN list next time I’m looking around for one.
like nordvpn (who was a spamming machine on my PC back when I used it) or surfshark
Just FYI neither of those has port forwarding.
ProtonVPN, AirVPN and PIA all support port forwarding iirc
thanks, I’ll try Air.
I’ve been an avid user of Windscribe for years. Works great and has great customer support. From what I can tell they also respect your privacy.
AirVPN and proton vpn can both do port forwarding
I’m a bit confused. Using mullvad and I’m still seeding fine.
Could anyone explain why I need portforwarding?
Using mullvad wireguard and qbittorrent
Seeding with ~1Mbit right now, which is normal for my connection
Edit: thought soulseek is some torrent slang or client, I’m an idiot ^^
OP wants to use Soulseek which is P2P and requires port forwarding.
The post doesn’t mention seeding or torrenting whatsoever mate
Oh God I’m an idiot. Thanks
We are all idiots on this blessed day
you don’t really have a high bandwidth so I am not surprised that it makes no difference. For me port forwarding is the difference between seeding at 16MB/s vs 3/4MB/s
Does it only take affect seeding? I’m behind NAT with no port forwarding and often download at 80-110 MB/s (megabytes, not megabits).
it should affect downloading as well. It increases the number of peers able to connect to you for data exchange in both directions
Not sure how tech savvy are you, but you can get any VPS with public IP anywhere in the world, you can spin up a simple docker container and create a wireguard tunnel, for example https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy after that a simple port forward and you are good to go… or just connect other devices to the same network, and have them communicate through your own VPN between each other…
Any reputable VPS provider will not spy on your systems, so its even more secure than any VPN you can get. And if you need another IP/exit location, copy the folder with your docker compose file, shutdown one VPS, start another in different location, run one command to install docker, copy the directory and start it up.
I’m in a similar boat, loved mullvad for years but disappointed to see port forwarding go.
Dude still seems to be updating this; though, there doesn’t look to be a column detailing port forwarding. Maybe look into a few of these that look good?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s_o8QioqAILThKD04FYT95jI1siTOX5L/edit?pli=1#gid=1387289544
It was a good chart but stopped being updated around 2018/2019. I don’t remember the specifics but IIRC the owner (That One Privacy Guy) sort of ran out of time / retired from doing that stuff. He was also active on Reddit moderating VPN subs for a while & was great at keeping out the VPN spammers/shills there.
He had his own website that was bought by SafetyDetectives (a spammy ranking / affiliate linking site) so for a while people were worried that the new owners would break the VPN google doc with paid referral listings & whatnot. Kind of disappointing that it would be bought by a company clearly promoting the opposite of what That One Privacy Guy was working towards.
I’m not sure if that Google Doc you linked is a copy, or maybe the last version that existed. It was never totally clear if SafetyDetectives actually got control of the Google Doc but the rest is history now.
Pretty certain I linked the new one. Shows created January 2022 and last updated May 2023.
EDIT: Weird the last updated cell does show 2019, but looking at the docs metadata through Google drive shows Jan 2022 and May 2023. You may be right though, this could be stale.
The upper-left cell still indicates last updated 12/19/2019. But in any case the sheet itself still links to the new owners (clicking https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz now forwards to https://www.safetydetectives.com/best-vpns/) so I wouldn’t trust any changes to it.
http://privateinternetaccess.com has port forwarding.
PIA went bad. Got bought by a new owner.
Ugh. The death of reliable VPNs it seems.
would NOT recommend protonvpn since it’s the same company running protonmail, which has a history of bad security and has given private mails to governments. plus their free plan is pretty bad and doesn’t have port forwarding. but it’s an unpopular opinion ig.
anyways, i’ve been using airvpn and it’s been fairly good. some other ones include:
- windscribe
- torguard
- cryptostorm
The problem is you say all that then recommend PIA. Another company known for being shady af. Proton ultimately is still under Europol laws but they have an onion site and you can pay in crypto
I’d like to see your sources on that statement.
PIA has literally gone to US federal court at least twice, and prevailed both times proving they had no logs to share with authorities.
PIA has an actual track record of privacy protection success, which is something few other VPN providers have.
I didn’t know about PIA and never “recommended.” I just listed a few other services that I knew had port forwarding. I removed it from the comment.
💀 Source for them giving private emails to governments ?? Your emails are E2EE they don’t have the ability to decrypt them when you hold the keys. The most they did AFAIK is IP log a user because they had to comply with swiss law. Their VPN has no logs & has been audited
