For several years, I've been recommending AirVPN, Insorg, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA. So at this point, I can say that they've all been around for several years, and I've heard nothing bad about them.

Ones I have heard bad things about are EarthVPN, HideMyAss, Proxy.sh and PureVPN. And although I've heard nothing bad about ExpressVPN or NordVPN, the fact that they've bribed so many review sites to recommend them annoys me.

And yes, I have written stuff for IVPN.

I signed up for ExpressVPN before visiting China due to all sites recommending this (I badly wanted Google maps and Google to work). ExpressVPN does not work in China so either something changed very recently or a lot of people have been bribed to lie.

I would not trust ExpressVPN anymore for anything.

ExpressVPN works well in China, although there was a week in March where it was very spotty. I'm using it right now.

I agree that it's annoying how many review sites are getting paid to recommend them, but the service actually has been good for the last year.

I've tested several VPNs here, including Mullvad and Nord. ExpressVPN has the fastest speeds by a quite a bit.

However, self-hosted is much faster still. Unfortunately, it's less reliable.

"Works in China" as an unqualified statement is useless, equally "ExpressVPN does not work in China."

Are you in Beijing or Shanghai? Are you on China Telecom or China Mobile? Are you using the Sweden 2 or the Hongkong 3 server? Every permutation of those variables can have a different answer, and that answer can change from day-to-day.

My experience is that in southern provinces and bigger cities it is _more likely_ to work at any given time. But things change.

> However, self-hosted is much faster still. Unfortunately, it's less reliable.

Using a CN2 VPS is definitely a :racecar: in my experience. I primarily use shadowsocks instead of a proper VPN because moving to a different port when the interference starts is usually sufficient.

I disagree that the statement is useless, but here's some more info for you. I use China Telecom and China Mobile. Haven't tried China Unicom.

ExpressVPN has a message on most of their apps saying to use Tokyo 1, HK 4 or 5, Los Angeles 5, or UK Wembley when in China. I have used all of those servers, although HK 4 and 5 are the fastest.

I've used Shadowsocks and ShadowsocksR for my VPS. Switching ports will work for a while, but I've always found the server will get blocked eventually, possibly due to "active probing" as defined in this paper[1].

This person[2] suggests hosting a website from your Shadowsocks server as a cover, but I haven't tried it yet.

[1]https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2015/papers/p445.pdf

[2]https://medium.com/@phoebecross/bypass-gfw-china-2019-dc5959...

wow man thanks. I'm reading your Privacy Guides and they're quite quality materials!

TOR browser, or TAILS in a vm are both far superior to a VPN if you actually care about privacy. It is less convenient than using a VPN though - so lots of people sacrifice privacy and money for convenience and the feeling of privacy.

I agree but your bandwidth will take a massive hit. I pay for my fiber so I can have fast internet, with TOR I would only be able to use a fraction of that.

You can e.g. use Tor for surfing and no proxy for YouTube and other places you need speed for.

Also interested in this! Also why VPN vs just setting up one yourself on digitalocean or something like that?

(The reason why I'm not with a VPN yet is because it would compromise my speed. Am I overestimating the impact?)

A VPN won't compromise your speed if you have powerful enough equipment on both ends to encrypt/decrypt at speed. Latency will take a hit though.

If you setup your own VPN on some leased VPS, then you're the only user. So there's zero help re anonymity. And re privacy and security, you need to trust the VPS provider.

No free lunch :(

But a VPS on DO, AWS or gcloud also has numerous services on the same physical machine. It's not like every request coming from that machine is from you or am I missing your point?

Sure. But each VPS has its own IP address. The VPS provider probably retains logs. And its ISP probably also retains logs. And everything involving that IP address is associated with you.

For incoming traffic yes, but outgoing traffic is heavily dependent on what you use. A lot of virtual spaces use the same outgoing IP

I don't recall seeing that. VPS got their own public IPs. Which would show up in ipchicken or whatever.