How important is port forwarding, actually?

AVeryCleverName@lemmy.one to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 228 points –

I've been putting off renewing my mullvad membership because of the port forwarding thing. I only want to use it for torrenting. Is it really crucial to find a VPN that supports port forwarding? If so, what's the go to option now that it's becoming increasingly uncommon?

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there are perfectly fine alternatives.

Would you mind making some examples please?

https://lemmy.world/post/698471

ProtonVPN and AirVPN off the top of my head.

ProtonVPN has dynamic port forwarding via a Windows client (or a python script if on Linux). Just a heads up, since it could be awkward to work out if you're downloading from a headless server.

I've heard AirVPN is good. I switched to iVPN and I'm satisfied

Heads up if you don't already know, IVPN recently announced they are dropping port forwarding like Mullvad recently did. https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/

I use PIA (probably the cheapest out there). If you just care about torrenting, they’re quite good. I can saturate my Gbit connection and they offer PF (only for p2p applications though)

I tried getting port forwarding to work with PIA, but it seems to be unavailable within the US. Has that been the case for you as well? Not sure if it’d be worth using an international server with 1/10 the speed in order to enable port forwarding, but I would love to be able to be connectable.

How do you use it? Why do you say it is not available? I am in Europe but I’ve never seen anybody report what you’re saying.

Like I said, it is limited to p2p applications. You cannot host a web server or something similar.

Port forwarding isn’t available in the US, so I was curious if you’re in the country as well. But yeah if you’re in Europe then it makes sense that it’d be available to you!