Do you wish to remain anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the ideal solution for you.
While anyone can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to protecting user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website begins 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 nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.
They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of 2 lawyers and a small group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications company 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).
During the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a bigger company either.
Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is explained and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has established 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN stack up against its rivals with such strong personal privacy credentials?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with only 246 servers spread across 23 countries.
Most servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the absence of diversity of servers reduces the number of international AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their personal privacy.
That said, Air is well known for its exceptional performance across its server network, with lots of countries having high-performance physical individual servers.
They use transparent bandwidth allocation methods to provide a precise assessment of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, without any 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 protected 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. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So ignore PPTP and other risky protocols.
No choice is given to any service, application, or protocol when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is maintained. Significantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical constraints, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely trustworthy. The absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the newer protocol totally in place up until some of its technical and personal privacy concerns are addressed.
AirVPN has actually likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out things.
Switching is unlimited, so if you don’t like one server, you can quickly change servers as frequently as you like.
You can keep track of the existing load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).
There is a detailed specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered 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 considering that there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being provided will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A good feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service before registering. You do not need 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 extremely clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade 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 improve services, but you can ask for this information 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 determine what type of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without worrying about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.
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 personal privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or higher levels of privacy and information 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 remain safe with the high-level protection supplied.
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 forum enable you to get a sense of what current users are stating about the service before signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This indicates that anybody can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been inspected by a 3rd party.
Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best readily available. It resembles that of some other service providers, but still worth discussing. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The main data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your real email address. That’s great considering that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However understand that you will not be able to change 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 requested user information, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to give them.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, offered 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 quite as excellent as those service providers who utilize it as requirement.
Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the info you need to connect to a VPN.
Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide you. While it’s not difficult to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a heap 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 explain what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most current does not work on your setup.
After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re finished, you simply click Disconnect. Easy enough for anyone, but Eddie can do a lot more considering that AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.
Two essential AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer launches, but you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.
Even though it specifies “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually 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 protected tunnel. A lot of basic kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, but 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 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 information about every one, such as the server’s nickname, area, latency in milliseconds from your place, and present users and server load. Outstanding stuff!
This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is recommended for you.
The Countries page shows the number of servers offered in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green sign is likewise 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 country, 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 many countries as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that country will be gotten rid of, efficiently making it a blocklist/denylist. To remove the green checkmark from a nation, click the empty box.
By picking a nation, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and choose the server you want in a specific country. Then, 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). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.
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 many apps show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained information, 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 a lot more.
Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the information they might ever desire about the different locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a valuable resource.
Lastly, Logs is an in-depth record of connections, routes, and other data.
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 utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The truly proficient user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.
If the large feature list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to find out what particular settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.
Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program normally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings till you search for them. If you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will offer it.
Suppose you do not want 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 exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the exact same extensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and valuable status details.
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 country and select a particular city on the very same page. Some practical text additions make the info more understandable, but it’s still rather difficult to comprehend in some spots.
Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than most people will ever require. The software also attempts a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop alert, 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 shows 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.
However, reviewers have reported speeds to be outstanding. One stated there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually remarkable overall.
While it wasn’t rather on top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for many people, and scenarios like HD gaming, streaming, and video conferencing absolutely will not slow you down.
What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server places. This might restrict the accessibility of close-by servers for some users (which will always result in much 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 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 effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.
Certainly, some report that Air is pretty bad for streaming and does not work with any of the major streaming services. However, it appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the right server needs prolonged experimentation. This is probably because, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN doesn’t offer 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 examine to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
Streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, simply because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?
Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Just connect to the VPN server of your option and get going.
Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.
File sharing has good speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (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 exiting your gadget 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 hassle-free, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any concerns whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Rates
AirVPN uses a broader variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five gadgets simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an exceptional choice for individuals who live in a household house or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for most people, other VPN companies provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Pricing varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. Most plans provide good value; however, longer subscriptions use the best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be quickly transformed to and spent for in the currency of your option.
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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of global options are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing the 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 utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than lots of other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it provides e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a really active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Significantly, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t contracted out however can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and helpful, but the extensive responses can be pretty technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a lot of details, consisting of a large Frequently asked questions section that is broken up by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover several topics, however beginners will have the same problems comprehending a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Exceptional speeds with minimal 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 options in the client app.
Solid Customer Support.
Active Community Online Forums and In-depth Guides.
Great prices, 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 very easy to use or attractive like other services.
Client app may overwhelm more recent 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 Country.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?
The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with good prices. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. Even new users might do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and much better results than many of its rival VPN rivals.
When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on securing your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
It may not ensure the very same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which appoints you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent option for customers who value their 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 excellent option for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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