Do you want to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the ideal service for you if yes.
While anybody can declare to be distinct these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, stating, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anyone can claim to be distinct these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.
They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of 2 lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications service provider Iridium previously ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).
Throughout the last years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger organization either.
Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.
AirVPN takes the unconventional route and breaks the mold by providing a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
How does AirVPN stack up against its competitors with such strong privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with just 246 servers spread out throughout 23 countries.
The majority of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the lack of diversity of servers decreases the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their personal privacy.
That said, Air is well known for its impressive performance across its server network, with many nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to offer an accurate assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most dependable and protected method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.
Numerous ports and protocols are offered; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.
No preference is given to any protocol, application, or service when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Importantly, you can get rid of web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it instantly improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly trusted. The lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol fully in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy concerns are dealt with.
AirVPN has actually likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to try out things.
Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can easily switch servers as frequently as you like.
You can monitor the existing load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous problems on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).
There is a comprehensive specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.
All of it is nice, however since there is no third-party audit, you have to trust that what is being provided will work. But looking at the active community forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A great aspect of this is that you can see what other individuals say about the service before signing up. You don’t have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.
Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?
When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is very clear. Online privacy and security are the absolute priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no individual information logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.
AirVPN does not track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, however you can ask for this info to be erased at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.
As a result, nobody can identify you online; not even your ISP can tell what sort of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi network without fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your information.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping methods will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They also state they abide by EU privacy regulations which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of personal privacy and information protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can utilize it to discover who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection offered.
If your ISP or country blocks OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.
Open-source clients and a lively community online forum enable you to get a sense of what existing users are saying about the service before signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This indicates that anybody can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have been examined by a 3rd party.
Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the best available. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth discussing. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The main information channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s excellent given that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. But be aware that you will not be able to alter your account’s password if you do not utilize one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence information). But even if the government requested user info, AirVPN would have nothing to give them.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, available on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as good as those providers who utilize it as standard.
Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the information you need to connect to a VPN.
There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it doesn’t have the most user-friendly interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a ton of download options. There are builds for various operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most current doesn’t operate on your setup.
After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You just click Disconnect when you’re completed. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do so much more considering that AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.
2 essential AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system launches, however you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.
Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe tunnel. Most standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.
Eddie’s design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.
The Overview simply displays the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.
The Servers page displays all readily available servers in the network, together with comprehensive information about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and present users and server load. Impressive stuff!
This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you know whether a server is suggested for you.
The Countries page displays the variety of servers offered in each country at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also shown. Lots of servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller sized ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.
A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be found on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is basically a favorites list; you might select as numerous countries as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be removed, effectively making it a blocklist/denylist. To remove the green checkmark from a nation, click the empty box.
By choosing a country, you are not instantly connected to a VPN server. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket).
The Speed tab displays an easy throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.
While most apps display your existing VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, current user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information downloaded and uploaded, and much more.
Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever desire about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s a valuable resource.
Logs is an in-depth record of connections, routes, and other information.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables you to tweak the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel via more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The really competent user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface by means of the Logs pane.
If the vast feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to figure out what specific settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.
Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply due to the fact that of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program usually works fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you search for them. If you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will provide it.
Suppose you do not want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.
How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?
Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the very same comprehensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and useful status information.
Different pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and select a specific city on the same page. Some practical text additions make the details more understandable, however it’s still quite challenging to understand in some spots.
Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than most people will ever require. The software application also attempts a little bit more to help you, with extra text subtitles to describe what each option does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN generally connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In terms of personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.
Now let’s get to those speeds.
Due to the fact that AirVPN just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors.
Reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. One stated there wasn’t a single country where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.
While it wasn’t rather at the top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for many people, and circumstances like HD video, gaming, and streaming conferencing certainly will not slow you down.
What AirVPN does not have is a broader variety of server areas. This might limit the availability of close-by servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for most people in the United States and Europe, however possibly less so for other regions.
Streaming
Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.
Certainly, some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and does not work with any of the significant streaming services. However, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server needs prolonged experimentation. This is probably due to the fact that, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN doesn’t use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
Streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN excels, just because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?
Yes, it does; every internet protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Certainly, Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Just connect to the VPN server of your option and get going.
Plus, you can use port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Numerous applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.
File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for as much as 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really practical, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no issues whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Prices
AirVPN uses a broader variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five gadgets all at once, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an outstanding choice for people who live in a household house or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five really should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.
Rates differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan includes the same features. Many plans use good value; however, longer memberships offer the best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time currency exchange rate for those abroad, so it can be quickly converted to and spent for in the currency of your option.
The existing plans available are:
Three days- EUR2
One month – EUR7
Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month
Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month
One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month
Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month
Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month
AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide options are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing the discount coupon code they send you.
There’s likewise a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or used more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.
AirVPN Customer Assistance
AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than many other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it provides e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has an extremely active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Notably, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t outsourced however can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are helpful and friendly, but the detailed responses can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a great deal of details, including a big FAQs area that is separated by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, however newbies will have the same troubles comprehending a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Excellent speeds with very little loss.
Unrestricted P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.
Strong security on servers and apps alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.
Network Lock/Kill Switch.
Split tunneling.
Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.
Supports Tor over VPN.
Easy app setup and usage.
Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.
Strong Customer Support.
Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.
Good costs, particularly for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists shield you from ads, adware, trackers, and harmful sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t really easy to use or pretty like other services.
Client app may overwhelm newer users.
It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Maybe there are too many advanced options.
Located in 14-Eyes Nation.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?
The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with great pricing. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. However even brand-new users might do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to use if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than much of its rival VPN competitors.
When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more focused on protecting your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
It may not ensure the exact same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which appoints you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good alternative for consumers who value their privacy.
While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an exceptional choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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