VPN illiterate in need of help

[Kalmado]

I would like to point out that VPNSecure's normal price is $80 for a yearly subscription. It is extremely sketchy that they offer a life time subscription for $34 — especially considering Slickdeals state that the original price is $39, and their offer provides $5 off.



Yes, Hola did this.

A deal site is offering a cheaper option than going directly through the company. Crazy!!! Next you're going to tell me buying Uplay keys from sites like GMG is sketchy instead of buying directly from Ubisoft.

[Uzor]

I mean, you're free to purchase it if you want. I'm just letting you know that it is extremely sketchy to offer any kind of lifetime subscription as a VPN provider — especially at half the price of your yearly subscription cost. It's not like GMG is offering lifetime access to all of Ubisoft's games for the cost of a single game.

Besides, SecureVPN does mention in their own TOS that they will turn over logs if asked for it. So there's also that.

[gattsuru]

So many VPN providers are shady or incompetent that you really need to presume bad faith until demonstrated otherwise. In the best case you're 'merely' looking at old implementations or dns leakage, but some fly-by-night companies folk don't implement encryption properly or at all. In the worst case, some shadier VPNs even inject data into requests, up to and including advertisements or malicious code. Even a company offering a lifetime subscription in good faith may only be doing so til they rename-and-rebrand-and-sunset in a month.

In the information security sphere, I've heard good things about Freedome, but even they've only had the barest form of a real security audit.

If you're willing to spend some time and effort, Trail of Bit's Algo is pretty easy to configure and very well-audited, and using it means that you'd control the cloud server running. This could be broken with a warrant or really significant resource investment, but for the typical eavesdropping-from-isp it'll work fine, and you're banking on Google, Amazon, or DigitalOcean's reputation and infrastructure rather than someone much smaller.

[Kalmado]

Probably going with PIA as a new deal popped up. 2 years for $51 after using promo code PIA15 at checkout.