Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN could be the best option for you if yes.
While anybody can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.
AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site 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 comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it really is.
They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company 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).
During the last decade, 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 business’s history is explained and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN compare to its competitors with such strong personal privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with just 246 servers spread across 23 nations.
Most servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the absence of diversity of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their privacy.
That said, Air is popular for its outstanding performance throughout its server network, with many nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to offer a precise evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely 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 reliable and safe and secure 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 unsafe protocols.
When it boils down to it, no preference is given to any protocol, service, or application. Net Neutrality is maintained. Importantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical restrictions, and traffic shaping.
The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it immediately improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol fully in place up until some of its technical and privacy problems are attended to.
AirVPN has actually also added a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to experiment with things.
Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can easily change servers as frequently as you like.
You can keep an eye on 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 comprehensive 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, but considering that there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being offered will work. However looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A great thing about this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service prior to registering. You do not have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.
Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?
The company is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no personal info logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.
AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request this info to be deleted 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 figure out what type of traffic or protocol you’re using.
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 methods will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They likewise say they follow EU privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact 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 learn who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection supplied.
If your ISP or country obstructs 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 present users are stating about the service before registering.
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 examined by a third party.
Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best offered. It resembles that of some other suppliers, but still worth discussing. The very first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The main data channel employs 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 fantastic considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you will not be able to alter 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 data). Even if the government asked for user info, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to provide them.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, available on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s substantial capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those service providers who utilize it as standard.
Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the info you need to connect to a VPN.
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 easy to use user interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a ton of download options. There are builds for various running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s brand-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 place. When you’re completed, you just click Disconnect. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more given that AirVPN offers 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 enables 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.
Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in 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 safe tunnel. Many 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 layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six 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, in addition to comprehensive details about every one, such as the server’s nickname, place, latency in milliseconds from your location, and present users and server load. Outstanding 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 variety of servers offered in each nation at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise revealed. 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 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 basically a favorites list; you might select as lots of nations as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that country will be removed, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To eliminate 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, return to the Servers page and pick the server you desire in a specific country. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are also a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated details on ping times and load times.
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 many apps show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows 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, information uploaded and downloaded, and far more.
Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the info they could ever want about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s an invaluable resource.
Finally, 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 by means of more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The really experienced user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.
If the vast function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be difficult to figure out what specific settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.
Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just since of its complexity. Remember that the program typically works fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you try to find them. Nevertheless, if you periodically yearn for power or configurability, the app will supply 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 a very feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application supplies the very same substantial configuration options as its desktop sibling and helpful status info.
Different pages for country 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 specific city on the very same page. Some handy text additions make the information more reasonable, 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 a lot more than many people will ever need. The software application also tries a little bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each option does.
Speeds/Performance
Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN typically 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, alerting us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to 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.
Because AirVPN only supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition.
Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. One said there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually excellent overall.
While it wasn’t rather at the top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and situations like HD streaming, video, and video gaming conferencing certainly will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server locations. This might restrict the accessibility of nearby servers for some users (which will always result in much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding option for many people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps 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.
Indeed, some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the significant 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 rarely work, and when they do, finding the ideal server requires lengthy experimentation. This is probably due to the fact that, unlike other companies, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s site, 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, merely since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more concentrated on privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow P2P?
Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Simply connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.
Plus, you can use 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 decent speeds on regional 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 works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, triggered by default, will obstruct all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no problems whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Rates
AirVPN uses a larger variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five devices concurrently, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an exceptional option for individuals who live in a family home or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for most people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Rates varies based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. Many plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer memberships offer the best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. They utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be quickly transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.
The present 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 options are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending 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 haven’t broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data during that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
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 assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Notably, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t contracted out however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get an action. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and handy, however the comprehensive responses can be pretty technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a lot of details, consisting of a large FAQs section that is separated by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various subjects, however beginners will have the exact same problems comprehending a great deal 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 choices in the client app.
Strong Customer Service.
Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.
Great prices, especially for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.
Client app might overwhelm newer users.
It is very hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Perhaps there are a lot of advanced options.
Found in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?
So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with great prices. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. 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 much better results than a number of its rival VPN competitors.
This VPN service is more focused on protecting your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.
Although it may not guarantee the same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great alternative for customers who value their personal privacy.
While it does not 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 choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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