Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the ideal option for you if yes.
While anyone can declare to be unique nowadays, when it comes to VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, specifying, “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 distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications provider Iridium previously ran it, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).
During the last years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a bigger business either.
Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is explained and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 offering a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN compare to its rivals with such strong personal privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with just 246 servers spread throughout 23 nations.
A lot of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the absence of variety of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their privacy.
That stated, Air is well known for its impressive performance across its server network, with lots of nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to offer an accurate evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, without any 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 safe way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.
Numerous ports and protocols are available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Moreover, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.
When it comes down to it, no choice is given to any application, service, or protocol. Net Neutrality is maintained. Significantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical restrictions, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trusted. The absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol completely in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy issues are dealt with.
AirVPN has actually also included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.
Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can quickly switch servers as frequently as you like.
You can keep track of the current load on each server, any existing concerns, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).
There is a comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.
All of it is nice, but considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being provided will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A nice thing about this is that you can see what other people state about the service before registering. 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 pertains to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is really clear. Online personal privacy and security are the outright concern, with security 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 just gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request for this info to be deleted at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.
As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can determine what type of traffic or protocol you’re using.
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 strategies will fail against AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They also say they stick to EU privacy policies and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or higher levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that no one can use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level protection offered.
If your ISP or nation blocks OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.
Open-source clients and a lively community forum allow 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 huge plus. This indicates that anyone can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but only ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a third party.
Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the best available. It’s similar to that of some other suppliers, however still worth pointing out. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The main data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your genuine email address. That’s terrific since it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However know 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 countries that share intelligence data). However even if the government asked for 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, offered on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s substantial ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as excellent as those suppliers who utilize it as requirement.
Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the info you require to connect to a VPN.
Unfortunately, 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 might be a more tough learning curve for inexperienced users.
With Windows, there are a lot of download choices. There are builds for numerous running 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 discuss what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most present does not operate on your setup.
After introducing it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re finished, you just click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more because AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.
2 key AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer starts up, but you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you selected last.
Although it specifies “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. Many 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 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.
The Overview merely shows 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 offered servers in the network, in addition to comprehensive details about every one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Impressive stuff!
This tab also has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.
The Countries page displays the variety of servers readily available in each country at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also shown. Lots of servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller 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 country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you may 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 get rid of the green checkmark from a nation, click the empty box.
By picking a nation, you are not right away 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 simple 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, data uploaded and downloaded, and much more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the information they might ever desire about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a valuable resource.
Lastly, Logs is a comprehensive record of connections, routes, and other information.
This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it must constantly connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom-made DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The truly proficient user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface by means of the Logs pane.
If the vast function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to figure out what particular settings do and how to get the wanted results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of personalization.
However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Remember that the program usually works fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you search for them. If you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.
Suppose you don’t wish to use 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?
There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software offers the same comprehensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and valuable status details.
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 select a particular city on the very same page. Some helpful text additions make the info more understandable, however it’s still quite tough to understand in some spots.
Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than many people will ever need. The software likewise tries a bit more to help you, with extra text subtitles to discuss what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN usually connects rapidly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In terms of privacy, leak tests revealed 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.
It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors due to the fact that AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.
Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be exceptional. One stated there wasn’t a single country where they could complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was really remarkable overall.
While it wasn’t rather on top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for the majority of people, and scenarios like HD streaming, video, and video gaming conferencing absolutely won’t slow you down.
What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server locations. This may restrict the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for many people in the United States and Europe, but maybe less so for other regions.
Streaming
Streaming the huge services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has actually 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.
Indeed, some report that Air is quite 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 right server requires lengthy experimentation. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s website, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can check to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.
Streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN excels, simply since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?
Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Simply connect to the VPN server of your option and get going.
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 Web.
File sharing has good speeds on regional servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Prices
AirVPN provides a larger variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 gadgets concurrently, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.
This makes it an outstanding choice for people who live in a household home or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for many people, other VPN suppliers provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Prices varies based upon the subscription length, and each plan includes the exact same features. Many plans provide good value; however, longer memberships use the very best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be easily transformed to and paid for in the currency of your option.
The present 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 also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day complimentary trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using the voucher 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 utilized more than 5 GB of data during that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
AirVPN has a different customer support offering than many other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it uses e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has an extremely active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t outsourced but can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get a response. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the agents are friendly and valuable, however the extensive answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s website has a lot of details, consisting of a large FAQs section that is broken up by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various subjects, however newbies will have the exact same problems comprehending a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Exceptional speeds with very little loss.
Unlimited P2P allowed 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 options in the client app.
Solid Customer Service.
Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.
Good costs, particularly for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from ads, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t really user-friendly or attractive like other services.
Client app might overwhelm more recent users.
It is very hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Maybe there are too many advanced options.
Located in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are reasonably low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?
So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with excellent pricing. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN provider. Even new users could do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and better results than much of its rival VPN competitors.
When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more focused on securing your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Although it may not guarantee the exact same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for consumers who value their privacy.
While it does not hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the very best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an exceptional option for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
Click Here Or Below To Join AirVPN Today!!
AirVPN Vs NordVPN Comparison: What You Should Learn
