VPN recommendations?

[Philistine]

With AT&T (among other ISPs) preparing to monitor and report P2P traffic to copyright holders I want a secure way to keep torrenting anime.

I have little interest in the crap Hollywood peddles, but AT&T may just see me torrenting and interfere with my Internet access.

So far from my research paying for a VPN looks like a inexpensive and secure solution. I'm not very interested in a seedbox as my bandwidth at home (and my 4TB of storage) are more than what I'd be able to get from a seedbox. So I was wondering what people's experiences have been with VPNs?

I'd like the VPN to work with Vuze (I've been using it for more than 6 years naow, I'm not going to give it up easily). Cost isn't that much of a concern as much as it just works without a lot of hassle.

[megido-rev.M]

Have you been able to find some suggestions at TorrentFreak? I usually see the topic pop up there in the comments.

[Philistine]

I have read a few articles on torrentfreak and the associated comments and while recommendations abound there is very little information on actual user experiences.  A lot of people saying this service is great or that service sucks but no real "this is why I liked/hated *insert service*". Its been a bit frustrating finding real user experiences.

That said I've taken the plunge myself and tried two services I found recommended by torrentfreak.com and lifehacker.com.

I first tried Private Internet Access. This was a full VPN service. It takes over all the Internet access from your PC through either manually editing your network preferences or using their installable client.

My initial setup went fine with the client. After running the client I was able to have access to the Internet and my external IP  did indeed show my location as another country (in this case the Netherlands). Browsing was just as fast as without the VPN. Where my first problem occurred was torrenting with Vuze. I was having NAT problems. My downloads were fairly fast, not maxing out my bandwidth but reasonable, but seeding was crippled. With the NAT problems I was only seeding at 1/10th my upload bandwidth. There was an option to use port forwarding in the VPN client but still the problem persisted.

After messing around for a couple hours, researching Google and trying a different bittorrent client something got messed up. I could no longer get the client to connect. Which meant I no longer had any Internet access. At all. I got out my tablet and fruitlessly searched the Private Internet Access site for a solution to restore my Internet (their "Knowledge Base" was devoid of any information at all). I contacted them and received a reasonably prompt reply with a couple solutions that unfortunately did not work. In the end I asked for a refund (still pending).

I was able to get my Internet access working on my own. For some reason DHCP had been disabled. Took a while to figure that out.

The second service I tried (and am using) was TorGuard. The service I chose here was their torrent proxy service. Instead of encrypting all your Internet access you configure your torrent client to exclusively use their proxy. All torrent traffic is routed through an anonymous, encrypted proxy (you ISP cannot see that you are torrenting).

Set up was quite easy through the guide on their site. This time there were no NAT problems and I am able to max out my upload speed. So far I'm very happy with how easy it was to set up and that it just works.

An added benefit is that I have set up my Opera browser to use the same torrent proxy service so all my web browsing with Opera is also anonymous (my ip address in Opera shows my location as Toronto, Canada).

All in all a bit frustrating but I think I've found a solution that will work for me.

[megido-rev.M]

Ah, very well :).