Mullvad tends to be the highest recommended VPN provider.

https://mullvad.net/

Shameless self promotion: https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...

Love Windscribe. At a time when I wasn't able to afford a subscription, they were one of the very few services with a free plan that didn't look shady.

I have since been a happy paying customer and also recommended it to a couple of my friends.

Windscribe is cool with generous free tier offer and simple, clean UI/UX

For most use-cases I can't really see any reason not to go with Mullvad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551960

https://mullvad.net

I'm saddened to see that "thatoneprivacysite", once a comprehensive database of VPNs and their policies, now redirects to some scammy-looking "review" site that that pimps ExpressVPN right at the top of the front page.

A shame.

It looks like the next-best guide that hasn't been corrupted by referral money is privacytools.io, which currently recommends Mullvad, ProtonVPN, and IVPN. https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/

I put my trust in the review from Wirecutter / NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-vpn-service/).

I have used both Mullvad and TunnelBear. I bought a year of TB. It's on all the time and I forget it is there.

OpenVPN running off your own NAS. Why would you use anything else?

(Except for getting around geo-blocking, of course)

Pretty sure a large chunk of these VPN users are just using it to avoid DMCA notices when torrenting. Rolling your own VPN doesn't get you around this.

My NAS runs in my house. While I do have a VPN to connect when away, I don't particularly care for my ISP seeing all my traffic or being tracked by the entire web. I use Mullvad to try to achieve some semblance of privacy.

> I don't particularly care for my ISP seeing all my traffic or being tracked by the entire web. I use Mullvad to try to achieve some semblance of privacy.

But VPNs don't enhance your privacy though - you're trading your ISP's snopping for your VPN operator's snooping - and TLS makes it all irrelevant.

Yes, I need to trust the VPN provider and that's a trade I'm willing to make. My ISP has my name, address, DOB, and my SSN. My VPN provider has none of those things.

TLS solves part of the problem with ISP snooping, sure. The ISP does still know which IPs I'm accessing though and since SNI information isn't encrypted, so they may even know the hostname. There's more to it than reading the contents of sites I visit.

I'm also not fond of my ISP-issued IP trivially pin-pointing the town I live in. I'm less fond of the way trackers and advertisers use that information. Routing my traffic through a VPN addresses that point as well.

Maybe some day we'll see wide deployment of IPv6 addresses that don't reveal geographic location. Maybe some day we'll have encrypted SNI everywhere. Maybe some day 100% of all network traffic, HTTP or otherwise, will use TLS. But, we're not there today. A VPN provider is a nice stopgap measure.

I'd argue that is an enhancement of my privacy. It's had a nice secondary benefit of avoiding ISP throttling or peering disputes.

Wireguard, better throughput and latency. Mullvad accepts Wireguard, btw.

IVPN and Mullvad have a good reputation