Do you wish to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN could be the ideal service for you if yes.
While anybody can declare to be unique nowadays, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to protecting user privacy. 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 declare to be distinct these days, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.
They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of 2 lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications supplier Iridium previously 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 bigger organization either.
Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is discussed and information the personal 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 offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN stack up against its competitors with such strong privacy credentials?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with only 246 servers spread out throughout 23 nations.
The majority of servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the lack of variety of servers decreases the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while keeping their privacy.
That stated, Air is well known for its impressive performance across its server network, with many countries having high-performance physical individual servers.
They use transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to offer an accurate evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no speed restrictions or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most safe and secure and trusted method to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.
Various ports and protocols are available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. In addition, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.
No choice is given to any service, application, or protocol when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can get rid of web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reliable. Nevertheless, the absence of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol totally in place until a few of its technical and privacy concerns are addressed.
AirVPN has also added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out things.
Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can easily switch servers as often as you like.
You can keep an eye on the existing load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).
There is an in-depth specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.
All of it is nice, however because there is no third-party audit, you have to trust that what is being provided will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A nice thing about this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service prior to registering. 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 company is very clear. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no personal 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 collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request this information to be deleted 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 using.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without stressing over your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping techniques will fail versus AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They likewise state they follow EU privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection offered.
You can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor if your ISP or nation blocks OpenVPN.
Open-source clients and a lively community online forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are stating about the service before signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This implies 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.
Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the finest available. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your real email address. That’s excellent given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However be aware that you will not have the ability to alter your account’s password if you don’t use one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence information). However even if the government asked for user information, 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 significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as great as those suppliers who use it as standard.
Establishing the app is easy, and it has all the information you need to connect to a VPN.
Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not difficult to get things working, it doesn’t have the most user-friendly user interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a ton of download alternatives. There are builds for various operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, 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 current does not work on your setup.
After introducing it, select ‘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, 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.
Two crucial 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 pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.
Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure tunnel. A lot of basic kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, however you can set up 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 available servers in the network, together with detailed information about each one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing users and server load. Impressive stuff!
This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.
The Countries page displays the number of servers available in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also revealed. Numerous 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 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 essentially a favorites list; you may select as lots of nations as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be removed, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.
By selecting a nation, 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 shows an easy 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 the majority of apps display your existing VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained info, 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 far more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the information they might ever want about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.
Lastly, 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 permits 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 versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The genuinely knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, to name a few 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 desired outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.
However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Remember that the program generally operates fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you look for them. If you occasionally yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.
Suppose you don’t 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?
There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software provides the very same substantial configuration choices as its desktop sibling and handy status info.
Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a nation and choose a specific city on the exact same page. Some valuable text additions make the info more reasonable, but it’s still quite tough to comprehend in some spots.
Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still a lot more than many people will ever need. The software likewise attempts a little bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects quickly 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, notifying us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to personal privacy, leak tests showed 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.
Because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition.
Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. One stated there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually impressive overall.
While it wasn’t quite on top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for many people, and circumstances like HD gaming, streaming, and video conferencing certainly will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server places. This may restrict the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, but perhaps less so for other areas.
Streaming
Streaming the huge 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 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. However, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix rarely work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs lengthy experimentation. This is probably because, unlike other service providers, AirVPN doesn’t use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Luckily, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can inspect to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
However, streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, merely because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more concentrated on privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?
Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.
Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. A number of applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.
File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your device 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 really hassle-free, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no problems whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Prices
AirVPN offers a wider variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 devices concurrently, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.
This makes it an excellent choice for individuals who live in a family home or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.
Pricing differs based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. The majority of plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer memberships use the best deal.
The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those overseas, 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide options are also 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 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 Assistance
AirVPN has a different customer support offering than many other VPNs. While it doesn’t 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.
Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out but can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That said, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the representatives are useful and friendly, but the comprehensive answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a great deal of info, including a big FAQs area that is separated by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover several subjects, but beginners will have the same problems comprehending a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Outstanding 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 use.
Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.
Strong Customer Service.
Active Community Online Forums and Comprehensive Guides.
Excellent prices, particularly for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists shield you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and harmful sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.
Client app may overwhelm newer users.
It is really 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?
The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with great 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 might do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to use if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than many of its rival VPN rivals.
When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on safeguarding your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
It might not guarantee the very same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good alternative for customers who value their personal privacy.
While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding option for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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