Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the best service for you if yes.
While anyone can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.
AirVPN stands apart 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 special nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.
They have actually been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of two lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications service provider Iridium previously ran it, but 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 decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger business either.
Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is discussed and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has actually developed 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
So how does AirVPN stack up against its rivals with such strong privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with only 246 servers spread across 23 countries.
A lot of servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the lack of variety of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their personal privacy.
That stated, Air is well known 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 supply an accurate assessment of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no 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 reliable and protected method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.
Many 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. So forget PPTP and other unsafe protocols.
When it comes down to it, no preference is given to any protocol, application, or service. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can get rid of web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic constraints, and traffic shaping.
The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its rivals. That said, 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 personal privacy problems are attended to.
AirVPN has also added a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to experiment with things.
Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can quickly change servers as frequently as you like.
You can keep track of the current load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous problems on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).
There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available 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, but considering that there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being offered will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A great aspect of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to 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?
The company is very clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual 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 just collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request this info to be erased 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 sort of traffic or protocol you’re using.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi network without fretting about your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics will fail against AirVPN because your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They also state they follow EU privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.
You can get a brand-new IP address to hide your IP so that no one can use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level security provided.
If your ISP or nation obstructs 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 prior to signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This indicates that anyone can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been inspected by a 3rd party.
Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best readily available. It resembles that of some other service providers, however still worth discussing. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The main information channel employs AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s terrific given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But know that you won’t be able to alter your account’s password if you don’t utilize one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence data). Even if the federal 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, readily available on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, regardless of Eddie’s substantial capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers who use it as requirement.
Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the details you need to connect to a VPN.
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 easy to use interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a heap of download choices. There are builds for different 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 discuss what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most present does not work on your setup.
After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You simply click Disconnect when you’re completed. 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.
2 essential AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system starts up, however you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.
Even though it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. Most standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however you can set up the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.
Eddie’s design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 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 shows all available servers in the network, together with comprehensive details about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your place, and present users and server load. Remarkable stuff!
This tab also has an amber/green signal that lets you know whether a server is recommended for you.
The Countries page displays the number of servers offered in each country at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise revealed. Numerous 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 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 may choose as lots of nations as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be eliminated, effectively making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.
By selecting a country, 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 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 most apps show your existing VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows 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, data uploaded and downloaded, and a lot more.
Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the info they could ever want about the numerous locations, down to the number of users on a specific server. It’s a priceless resource.
Finally, Logs is a comprehensive record of connections, routes, and other data.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This permits you to fine-tune 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 via more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The genuinely proficient user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.
If the large function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be tough to find out what particular settings do and how to get the wanted outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.
Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just due to the fact that of its intricacy. Remember that the program usually operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings until you try to find them. Nevertheless, if you periodically yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.
Suppose you do not want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out 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 use a very feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software supplies the exact same comprehensive setup options as its desktop sibling and useful status info.
Different pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and pick a specific city on the exact same page. Some practical text additions make the info more easy to understand, however it’s still rather difficult 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 require. The software likewise attempts a bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN generally connects quickly and is ready to enter less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to personal 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.
Since AirVPN only 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 country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually outstanding overall.
While it wasn’t quite at the top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and scenarios like HD video, video gaming, and streaming conferencing absolutely will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a wider variety of server places. This may restrict the ease of access of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for most people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other areas.
Streaming
Streaming the huge 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 powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.
Some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and does not 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 hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server needs lengthy trial and error. This is most likely because, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Thankfully, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can inspect to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.
Streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, merely since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow P2P?
Yes, it does; every web protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Merely connect to the VPN server of your option and get going.
Plus, you can use 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 system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.
File sharing has good speeds on regional servers, allows port forwarding for up to 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 integrated 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 Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really practical, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no issues whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Prices
AirVPN offers a larger range of plans than a lot of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 devices simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.
This makes it an outstanding option for people who live in a household home or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN service providers provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Pricing varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. Many plans offer good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions offer the very best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be easily converted to and spent for in the currency of your option.
The existing plans offered 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 choices are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day complimentary trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing 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 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 uses e-mail assistance 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 however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a response. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are useful and friendly, however the thorough responses can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s website has a lot of details, including a large Frequently asked questions section that is separated by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, however novices will have the exact same troubles comprehending a great deal of the tech lingo 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 Support.
Active Community Online Forums and In-depth Guides.
Great costs, especially for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from ads, adware, trackers, and damaging sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t really user-friendly or attractive like other services.
Client app may overwhelm newer users.
It is very hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Perhaps there are too many advanced choices.
Located in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?
The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with good prices. It’s plainly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN provider. However even brand-new users could do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to use if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and much better results than a number of its rival VPN rivals.
When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on securing your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Although it may not guarantee the same level of 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 alternative for consumers who value their 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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