Your ISP is most certainly watching you if you use P2P sharing programs or bit torrent for file sharing. If you’re tired of feeling like you have a Hollywood lawyer breathing down your neck while you’re on the Internet, you can use a VPN service to encrypt your traffic, making it unreadable to your ISP or anyone else.
There’s a caveat here. Not all VPN services are the same. If you want to get an idea of which ones you should choose for torrenting and other P2P programs, here are some guidelines.
Does it Work with “X” Program?
A real VPN service encrypts any and all traffic coming to or from your computer. If you have problems and you’re using any of our preferred providers, it’s not a program incompatibility issue. There may, however, be policy issues about what you can do on the VPN service, and those are the big things you need to worry about. VPNs, however, encrypt everything.
Allowed Use
Some VPN providers allow P2P and torrent and some do not. This, of course, you must check out if P2P is the main reason that you’re using one of these services. Some providers will only allow P2P on specific servers. If you’re having issues, make sure you check this out because it may well be why your VPN works fine otherwise but not for torrenting. You might just have to change servers to make it work.
Logging
Get a VPN service that does not log. IPVanish, Private Internet Access and many others do not log your traffic. This means that, even if the entertainment cartels demand access to your logs, such providers have nothing to turn over. It’s the best way to go.
This should be outlined in the TOS of your provider. Read the TOS. You can also read any of our reviews to see what the logging policies are for any given provider. We make sure to include them so that you know.
Know Your Connections
OpenVPN is the latest, greatest thing that VPN providers are offering. Not all users have had good experiences with it, however. Check your IP address on Google—search for “What is my IP address”—once you connect to the VPN and then check for DNS leaks at this site. If your IP address is not hidden by your VPN service, you might want to try another protocol. Most providers offer L2TP/IPsec as an alternative, which is very reliable, though it takes more system resources.
The best VPN provider for your P2P endeavors offers different connection protocols, does not log and allows torrenting and P2P as a matter of policy. Check our preferred providers and you’ll find many that meet those standards.
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