Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the ideal option for you.
While anyone can declare to be unique nowadays, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its dedication to securing user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site begins with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anyone can declare to be special these days, when it concerns VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.
They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of 2 lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took over 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 business either.
Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is explained and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has developed or supported. These consist of an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.
AirVPN takes the non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN compare to its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with just 246 servers spread throughout 23 countries.
Most servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small concern here is that the lack of variety of servers decreases the number of global AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their personal privacy.
That stated, Air is popular for its exceptional performance across its server network, with lots of countries having high-performance physical individual servers.
They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to offer a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most reputable and safe method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.
Various ports and protocols are readily available; 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. So forget PPTP and other unsafe protocols.
When it comes down to it, no preference is given to any service, protocol, or application. Net Neutrality is upheld. Significantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical restrictions, and traffic shaping.
The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it instantly improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The absence of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place till some of its technical and personal privacy issues are addressed.
AirVPN has likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.
Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can easily switch servers as frequently as you like.
You can monitor the present load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous problems on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).
There is a comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with info like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.
All of it is nice, however considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being offered will work. Looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A great aspect of this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before signing up. You don’t need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.
Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?
When it concerns AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is extremely clear. Online personal privacy and security are the outright priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal info 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 just collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request this details to be erased at any time. This makes it among 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 stressing over your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your information.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They likewise state they abide by EU personal privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.
You can get a brand-new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can utilize it to discover who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level protection offered.
You can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor if your ISP or country obstructs OpenVPN.
Open-source clients and a lively community forum enable you to get a sense of what existing users are saying about the service prior to signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This suggests that anybody can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but just ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been inspected by a third party.
Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the best readily available. It resembles that of some other providers, however still worth mentioning. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The primary data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your genuine email address. That’s terrific given that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. But know that you won’t be able to change your account’s password if you do not use one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence information). However even if the federal government asked for user info, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, offered on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as great as those suppliers who use it as requirement.
Establishing the app is easy, and it has all the information you require to connect to a VPN.
There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use user interface, so it might be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.
With Windows, there are a lot of download options. There are builds for various operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most current doesn’t function on your setup.
After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest area. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more considering that AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.
Two crucial AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer system starts up, however you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.
Even though it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. Most standard kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, however you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.
Eddie’s layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.
The Overview just 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 shows all readily available servers in the network, together with in-depth info about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your place, and present users and server load. Impressive stuff!
This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you know whether a server is recommended for you.
The Countries page shows the number of servers available in each country at a glance, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also shown. Many 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 discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is basically a favorites list; you might select as lots of countries as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be removed, efficiently making it a blocklist/denylist. To eliminate the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.
By picking a country, you are not immediately 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 a basic throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be altered, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.
While a lot of apps display your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained info, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information uploaded and downloaded, and far more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever desire about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s an invaluable resource.
Logs is a comprehensive record of connections, routes, and other information.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This allows 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 try an SSH tunnel via more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The truly skilled user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.
If the huge function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to determine what particular settings do and how to get the wanted outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.
Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program generally functions fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings up until you search for them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally yearn for power or configurability, the app will supply it.
Suppose you do not want to utilize Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send 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 utilize an exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application offers the same comprehensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and valuable status info.
Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and choose a particular city on the very same page. Some valuable text additions make the info more understandable, however it’s still rather tough to understand in some spots.
Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than the majority of people will ever need. The software application likewise attempts a little bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects rapidly and is ready to enter less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, with the app detecting when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In terms of privacy, leak tests revealed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which reveals 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 actually reported speeds to be exceptional. One said there wasn’t a single nation where they could complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was really remarkable overall.
While it wasn’t quite on top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for the majority of people, and circumstances like HD streaming, video, and video gaming conferencing certainly will not slow you down.
What AirVPN does not have is a broader variety of server places. This might limit the availability of nearby servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding option for most people in the United States and Europe, however maybe less so for other areas.
Streaming
Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.
Some report that Air is pretty bad for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. It appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the best server requires prolonged trial and error. This is probably since, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.
The good news is, on AirVPN’s website, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can check to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
However, streaming is certainly not an area in which AirVPN stands out, just because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more concentrated on personal privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?
Yes, it does; every internet protocol, including peer-to-peer, is welcome. Certainly, Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s absolutely nothing to configure, no hoops to leap through. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.
Plus, you can use port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Numerous applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.
File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for up to 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 block all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have shown torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Rates
AirVPN uses a wider variety of plans than the majority of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five devices simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an outstanding option for people who live in a household home or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for many people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Rates differs based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. The majority of plans use good value; however, longer memberships offer the very best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they utilize the European Central Bank to supply real-time currency exchange rate for those overseas, so it can be quickly converted to and spent for in the currency of your choice.
The current plans readily 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 international alternatives are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using the coupon code they send you.
There’s also 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 numerous other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it offers e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Significantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get an action. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are practical and friendly, but the extensive answers can be quite technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s website has a great deal of information, including a big Frequently asked questions section that is separated by topic.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, but novices will have the same difficulties comprehending a great deal of the tech jargon in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Excellent speeds with minimal 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 installation and use.
Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.
Solid Customer Support.
Active Community Online Forums and In-depth Guides.
Great costs, especially for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and harmful sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t really user-friendly or attractive like other services.
Client app may overwhelm more recent users.
It is very hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Possibly there are a lot of advanced options.
Found in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are fairly low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?
So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with great rates. It’s clearly tailored 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. Even brand-new users might do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and much better results than much of its rival VPN competitors.
When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on securing your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Although it might not ensure the exact same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great choice for customers who value their personal 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 outstanding choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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Verdict: Is AirVPN The Best Choice For You?
