i think i’m nearing the end of my 3 year Nordvpn deal, and i’ve never had speed or connecting issues. but… for certain games (where everything happens on the server and the game locks up when lagging) it’s not ideal, but i’m not sure any VPN is to be honest.
But that’s not what i use it for anyway… when my sub expires i’ll most likely get another x year deal from Nordvpn.
It’l probably differ from country to country how reliable a VPN service is too.
VPN is mostly unnecessary except for very special situations or if you have more trust in such a VPN company than your internet service provider. When surfing in the WWW most websites use encryption and the only visible metadata from the outside is which server you’re connecting to. So even hotel or other public WLAN is not a problem.
I use VPN when I want to access my home or company network from the outside or for special maintenance purposes. Using a commercial VPN provider is not necessary in most cases (and I don’t trust them more than the network I’m connected to).
I frequent a forum that always fails with a 403 error, but only from my home network, wired or wireless. For years it worked normally, but two yrs. ago the 403 error failures began. The mods and Admins either don't know how to fix it, can't, or won't. They claim they don't see any reason for the 403 error failure. Theirs is the only site that has ever failed with a 403 error in my 23 yrs. of browsing from home on dialup, DSL and now fiber. The site works on my cell connection, and works fine from any other network or location. My ISP indicates the problem is on the forum host's end. Swapping routers has no effect, as my internet-facing IP always stays the same. No other forum members report similar failures, but I have to wonder how many potential members are stymied by 403 failures we never hear from.
All that to say I run the free VPN in Opera for access to that site and only that site. It's a clunky remedy, as 95% + of my browsing is on an old iPad that's too old to run the version of Opera needed. That limits me to one PC running Opera & it's built-in free VPN.
Those VPN Extensions for browsers like you mentioned work good too. Good to use when you need to hide quickly for a moment. Might not have all the choices for servers but it works for what it is.
You want to find out how to make your car harder to steal, you ask a car-thief.
You want to find out how to make your house harder to break into, you ask a burglar.
You want to find out how to protect your online privacy, you ask a pir8.
Some “2600”-type sites actually contacted every vpn provider they knew about to get their official statements as to whether/not they keep any records, where they’re based (ie, jurisdiction), and so on, and got interesting replies.
Some admitted they kept records but still “value your privacy” (hah!), whereas others simply don’t keep any records at all. Go’head and serve a subpœna for Joe Schmo’s online records, and sure we’ll comply. We have nothing to give you, but hey, we’ll let you look to see for yourself.
There’s a huge difference between keeping records but “valuing your privacy” (ie, we may not collect and sell your info, but wave a judge-signed piece of paper at us and we’ll bend over give them everything they want), and simply not having anything to give.
And they get “rated” each year or so, so in case there are any “policy changes” at Cheep VPN or VPNs’R’Us, they’ll pass along the info.