Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the perfect option for you.
While anyone can declare to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.
AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding 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 anybody can declare to be special nowadays, when it pertains to VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.
They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of two lawyers and a small group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications provider Iridium formerly ran it, however 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 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 business’s history is described and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
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 most, with only 246 servers spread out across 23 nations.
The majority of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the lack of variety of servers decreases the number of global AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their privacy.
That said, Air is popular for its exceptional performance throughout its server network, with many nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide a precise assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, with no speed constraints 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 dependable 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. So forget PPTP and other risky protocols.
No preference is given to any application, service, or protocol when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Significantly, you can overcome web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.
The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reliable. Nevertheless, the lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite staying up to date with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place till a few of its technical and personal privacy concerns are dealt with.
AirVPN has actually likewise included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.
Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can quickly switch servers as frequently as you like.
You can keep track of the present 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 comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with info like the available ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.
All of it is nice, however given that there is no third-party audit, you have to trust that what is being used will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A nice thing about this is that you can see what other individuals say 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?
When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is really clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal info 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 enhance services, but you can request for this info to be deleted 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 kind 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 strategies will fail against AirVPN because your ISP and government will just 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 very same or higher 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 use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level security 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 allow you to get a sense of what current users are saying about the service before signing up.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This suggests 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 been examined by a third party.
Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best available. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth mentioning. 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 information, not even your real e-mail address. That’s great given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be conscious that you will not be able to alter your account’s password if you don’t use 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 government asked for user details, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to offer them.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, readily available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as great as those service providers who use it as standard.
Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the details you need to connect to a VPN.
Sadly, 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 user-friendly user interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.
With Windows, there are a heap of download choices. There are builds for various running 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 brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most present does not operate 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 finished. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more since 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, but you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you selected last.
Despite the fact that it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. A lot of standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, but 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 shows all available servers in the network, in addition to detailed info about every one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your area, and existing 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 variety of servers readily available in each country 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 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 essentially a favorites list; you may select as many countries 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 picking a country, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and select the server you desire in a specific country. 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 also a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.
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 a lot of apps display your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals 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 downloaded and uploaded, and much more.
Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever want about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s a priceless resource.
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 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 try an SSH tunnel through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The truly knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.
If the huge function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be tough to determine what specific settings do and how to get the preferred results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in regards to customization.
However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program typically works fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings up until you look for them. If you occasionally yearn for 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 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 utilize an exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software offers the exact same comprehensive setup options as its desktop sibling and helpful status details.
Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and pick a specific city on the exact same page. Some handy text additions make the information more reasonable, however it’s still quite difficult to understand 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 need. The software application likewise tries a little bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to discuss what each option does.
Speeds/Performance
Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN generally connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to 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.
It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition due to the fact that AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.
Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be exceptional. Certainly, one said there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really outstanding overall.
While it wasn’t quite at the top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and scenarios like HD gaming, streaming, and video conferencing definitely will not slow you down.
What AirVPN lacks is a wider number of server areas. This might restrict the accessibility of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for most people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other regions.
Streaming
Streaming the huge services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has actually been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.
Indeed, some report that Air is pretty bad for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the significant 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 United States Netflix seldom work, and when they do, discovering the best server requires prolonged trial and error. This is most likely since, unlike other providers, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.
Streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, merely since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?
Yes, it does; every internet protocol, including peer-to-peer, is welcome. Certainly, Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to jump through. Merely connect to the VPN server of your option and get going.
Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve 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, permits port forwarding for up to 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct 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 extremely practical, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and without any problems whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Pricing
AirVPN uses a larger variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 gadgets 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 exceptional choice for individuals who live in a family house or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for many people, other VPN suppliers provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.
Rates varies based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. The majority of plans offer good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time currency exchange rate for those overseas, so it can be easily converted to and spent 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 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 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 used more than 5 GB of data during that time.
AirVPN Customer Assistance
AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than numerous other VPNs. While it does not 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 e-mail support isn’t outsourced but can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get an action. That said, the email support is high quality, and the representatives are valuable and friendly, but the thorough answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s website has a lot of details, consisting of a large FAQs section that is separated by topic.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, but newbies will have the very same difficulties understanding a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Excellent speeds with minimal loss.
Unrestricted P2P enabled with Port Forwarding.
Strong security on apps and servers 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 options in the client app.
Strong Client Service.
Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.
Good prices, especially 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 user-friendly or pretty like other services.
Client app may overwhelm more recent users.
It is very hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Maybe there are a lot of advanced alternatives.
Found 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, reputable, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. It’s plainly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those 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 new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and much better results than many of its competing VPN competitors.
This VPN service is more focused on safeguarding your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.
Although it might not ensure the same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great alternative for consumers who value their personal privacy.
While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an exceptional option for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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