I recently shopped around for VPN services, and found one that in my opinion seemed the best (for my use cases and privacy posture). But the sheer existence of multiple VPN services made me curious as to what other people here might use, and which factors drove the decision.
I use my own local Wireguard that runs on multiple Pis across the world linked into a single network. Wireguard just works for me on Linux and requires very little effort to set up compared to OpenVPN (not that it's hard if you have some networking knonwledge). There are GUI clients for Android and Gnome which also just work, and I don't use anything else.
I applied to one of the biggest VPN providers recently (the one that's pushed the most by all the YouTubers) and they jokingly implied that they can MITM any connection during an interview. Not sure what to do with that info.
I tried to dig into the legal entities behind that company as part of DD and it's pretty shady: multiple different company renames, offshore companies on far away islands, founders being involved in other questionable companies, no company/CoC information on the website (illegal in at least a few countries the do business in that I know), ToS mentioning unknown offshore companies and having points that are, again, illegal. How seems pretty trivial. As for why, your guess is as good as mine.
Tailscale. I have a “gaming PC” (my son calls it an “AI PC”) at home and my kit on the road is an iPad and a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I run a web application on that computer that I access on my iPad and if I need to do more I just log in with remote desktop. It took like 10 minutes to set up: zero trust means zero maintainance.
Conventional VPNs are a big pain in the ass, in AWS for instance, AWS doesn’t offer a VPN service that “just works” instead you have to run your own EC2 instance with a VPN and there was the time I provisioned a VPN on a tiny instance that was supposed to cost $5 or $10 a month but it went swap crazy and cost more like $300 a month in I/O.
Mullvad. I like their service, I've never had any issues with their application or network and I like how they do their business (the amount of privacy they provide).
Haven't really checked how they stack up price-wise. Feels like they are not too far from others and when it is a high quality service I don't really care to price compare too much.
I applied to one of the biggest VPN providers recently (the one that's pushed the most by all the YouTubers) and they jokingly implied that they can MITM any connection during an interview. Not sure what to do with that info.