Do you wish to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the best solution for you if yes.
While anybody can declare to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.
AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to securing user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site starts with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can claim to be special these days, when it comes to VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.
They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of two lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly 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.
Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is discussed and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has 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.
How does AirVPN stack up against its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller than a lot of, with just 246 servers spread out throughout 23 countries.
Most servers are in Europe (aside from those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the lack of variety of servers lowers 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 impressive performance throughout its server network, with numerous nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to provide an accurate assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, without any speed restrictions or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most safe and trusted 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. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.
When it boils down to it, no preference is given to any protocol, application, or service. Net Neutrality is upheld. Significantly, you can get rid of internet restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographical restrictions, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly trusted. The lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, however it will not put the newer protocol fully in place till some of its technical and personal privacy issues are attended to.
AirVPN has actually also 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 an eye on the existing 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 detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with information 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 given that there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being used will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A nice feature of this is that you can see what other individuals state 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 business is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. 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 doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request this details 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 figure out what kind of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics 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 also state they follow EU privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of personal privacy and information protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can utilize it to find out who you are. You’ll remain 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 enable you to get a sense of what present users are saying about the service before registering.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This indicates that anybody can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been checked by a third party.
Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best offered. It’s similar to that of some other providers, however still worth pointing out. The very first exchange uses 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 reduce this value. The primary data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your genuine email address. That’s fantastic given that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be aware 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 information). But even if the federal government asked for user details, 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, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as excellent as those suppliers who use it as requirement.
Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the information you need to connect to a VPN.
There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it doesn’t have the most user-friendly user 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 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 describe what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most present doesn’t function 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. Simple enough for anyone, but Eddie can do a lot more because AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.
Two key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer system starts up, but you can’t pick 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 same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure 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 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 shows all readily available servers in the network, along with detailed information about every one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your area, and existing users and server load. Excellent 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 available in each country at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also revealed. Many 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 country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you may pick as lots of nations as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that country will be eliminated, 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 a simple 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 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 downloaded and uploaded, and far more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the details they might ever desire about the various locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s an invaluable resource.
Finally, Logs is a detailed record of connections, routes, and other data.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables 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 through more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The genuinely proficient user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.
If the huge function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be difficult to find out what particular settings do and how to get the desired outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.
Nevertheless, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program typically works fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings till you search for them. If you periodically yearn for power or configurability, the app will offer it.
Suppose you don’t 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?
There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software offers the very same extensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and practical status information.
Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and choose a specific city on the very same page. Some useful text additions make the info more reasonable, however it’s still rather tough to comprehend in some spots.
Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than the majority of people will ever require. The software application also attempts a little bit more to assist you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each choice does.
Speeds/Performance
Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects rapidly and is ready to enter less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app finding when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop alert, 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 just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors.
Reviewers have reported speeds to be outstanding. Undoubtedly, one said there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.
While it wasn’t rather at the top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for many people, and scenarios like HD streaming, gaming, and video conferencing certainly will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a wider number of server locations. This might restrict the availability of nearby servers for some users (which will constantly result in much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for most people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other regions.
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 powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.
Some report that Air is pretty poor 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 United States Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the best server requires lengthy trial and error. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other companies, 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 inspect to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.
However, streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, merely because 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. Just connect to the VPN server of your option 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 poorly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.
File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at the same time (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, triggered by default, will block all traffic from leaving 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 very convenient, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have actually revealed torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no issues whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Rates
AirVPN uses a larger range of plans than the majority of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five devices all at once, 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 people who reside in a family house or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for most people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Pricing differs based on the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. Most plans offer good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions provide the best deal.
The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be easily transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.
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, 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 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 throughout that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than many other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it provides e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a very active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a response. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are friendly and practical, however the detailed answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s website has a great deal of details, consisting of a big Frequently asked questions section that is separated by topic.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, however beginners will have the exact same problems understanding a great deal of the tech jargon in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.
Unlimited P2P enabled 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 installation and usage.
Many, many advanced settings and customization options in the client app.
Strong Customer Care.
Active Community Online Forums and Detailed Guides.
Excellent 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 attractive like other services.
Client app might overwhelm more recent users.
It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Perhaps there are a lot of advanced options.
Located in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are fairly low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?
So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. It’s clearly 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 company. However even new users might 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 a lot of its rival VPN rivals.
When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more focused on securing your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Although it might not guarantee the very same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for consumers 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 exceptional choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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