What is the Best VPN?

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  • January 21, 2013 at 11:14 pm #10025
    Avatar photoTy
    Participant

    What VPN do you all use/what’s the best one to use? Doesn’t have to be free, just one thats fast and keeps a strong connection

    January 22, 2013 at 2:04 am #26068
    Avatar photoCharlie
    Keymaster

    The two most commonly recommended these days seem to be StrongVPN and Astrill. Free VPN’s are slow and unreliable, I would avoid them all together.

    January 22, 2013 at 4:40 am #26085
    Avatar photoMerior
    Participant

    Based on my experience I would class Strong as operational 90% of the time, however, this may well have degraded recently based on comments here. I then upgraded to a D-Link router to solve my wife’s flakey internet connection and Strong completely stopped working for me because they don’t support the D-Link protocols.

    Is there a VPN which will work with a D-Link router and is it reliable?

    January 22, 2013 at 8:03 am #26110
    Avatar photoBrad Gies
    Participant

    I’ve been using ExpressVPN and having no problems (knock wood).

    January 22, 2013 at 8:11 am #26111
    Avatar photoFederico
    Participant

    Strong VPN, Overplay, Express VPN, Pure VPN… all nice service…

    January 22, 2013 at 8:43 am #26114
    Avatar photoBen
    Moderator

    Merior – I am assuming that your D-Link doesn’t support PPTP (GRE tunneling). Switching to L2TP or SSTP, both of which StrongVPN support, should solve your problem.

    January 22, 2013 at 9:12 am #26118
    Avatar photoRick in China
    Participant

    I’ve can’t recall having any issues with StrongVPN in the 5 or so years I’ve been using it (pretty much daily). Best customer service available, also.

    January 22, 2013 at 9:24 am #26121
    Avatar photoZXL
    Member

    Been using VPN Express for 2 years. never had a problem(knock wood)

    January 22, 2013 at 1:26 pm #26126
    Avatar photoMerior
    Participant

    Thanks Ben but StronVPN have just confirmed that my D-Link DR-619 is not supported. They were kind enough to provide a couple of links to router models that were supported but the links were predictably blocked by China. LOL

    January 22, 2013 at 3:44 pm #26129
    Avatar photoBen
    Moderator

    Merior – You should still give L2TP or SSTP a try. You might save yourself some money.

    January 22, 2013 at 11:58 pm #26133
    Avatar photo7
    Participant

    Strong stopped working for me a few weeks ago. Even if it connected Facebook was still blocked, but then unblocked sites were unusably slow. I tried changing the settings and have yet to find alternate settings that could connect & ended up just trying something else.

    January 30, 2013 at 12:50 am #26381
    Avatar photodnvphoto
    Participant

    As you might know, China has been more actively fighting foreign VPNs for the last couple of months. A simple Google search and numerous conversations with StrongVPN’s support staff confirmed this. We gave up on VPN’s altogether and, for now, go with this simple free approach:

    http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/11/29/no-vpn-no-problem-a-new-way-around-chinas-great-firewall/

    There’s a lot of websites we can’t access, but it scratches the FB/Twitter bug…

    January 30, 2013 at 1:57 am #26382
    Avatar photoBen
    Moderator

    Care should be taken when copying and pasting stuff in to your hosts file. You could easily end up being tricked in to redirecting yourself to a phishing site which steals your username and password.

    January 30, 2013 at 3:00 am #26383
    Avatar photoCharlie
    Keymaster
    Quote:
    http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/11/29/no-vpn-no-problem-a-new-way-around-chinas-great-firewall/

    There’s a lot of websites we can’t access, but it scratches the FB/Twitter bug…

    What hosts changes did you make to set this up? I hadn’t even heard about this as a method to access blocked sites in China.

    January 30, 2013 at 3:16 am #26396
    Avatar photodnvphoto
    Participant

    having trouble finding the exact instructions i used… but some variation of the search “hosts file modify mac china” (i use the canadian google.ca website as it’s not blocked here). be careful though, messing with terminal can be dangerous as i think you know. but i got the list of IPs that i pasted into the hosts file directly from google (they update them every few months from what i hear). it included all google services, youtube (which i can access, but the videos won’t play…), facebook, twitter, and a few others i think.

    if i find the instructions i used, i’ll post.

    January 30, 2013 at 4:26 am #26406
    Avatar photoRick in China
    Participant

    I use Google’s DNS as primary DNS server (8.8.8.8), but as Ben mentioned, changing your hosts file isn’t a good idea for public services.

    January 30, 2013 at 5:45 am #26410
    Avatar photoChris Ziich
    Moderator

    cool. I just tried this. Confirmed to work. Facebook access without a vpn.

    January 30, 2013 at 12:08 pm #26429
    Avatar photo7
    Participant

    FB still doesn’t work for me. Though oddly the FB app on my iPhone has been working without VPN since last weekend (at least as of last night.)

    March 10, 2013 at 8:55 am #27913
    Avatar photoIan
    Participant

    does anybody have the host files or address for FB?

    March 10, 2013 at 11:21 am #27919
    Avatar photoChris Ziich
    Moderator

    just copy/paste this into your hosts file, and make sure you’re using https:// :

    173.252.110.27 http://www.facebook.com

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