Strong VPN

now, to be fair - the vpn is still good. and that's the point - it could be *sooo* much better if more time were spent on it, instead of on building a nord ecosystem, which we never asked for. my subscription has a lot of time left, but when it nears its end, you can bet your ass I'll be looking around for alternatives, and by that i mean a strong vpn-only solution, and not a cloud-storage/password manager/fuck knows what else they'll come up with/vpn hybrid monstrosity of a product.

I was in Shanghai last month & in previous years bypassing the firewall was not too much of a hassle. When I arrived in Shanghai for the holidays this year my old VPN provider didn't work anymore, plus they added DNS poisoning and bandwidth throttling. I actually upgraded TO StrongVPN, which seems to be one of the affected VPN services now.My conclusion was that it has become effectively impossible to run a western IT-oriented business from Shanghai.

For example, I was unable to use my WiTopia account to use Hulu.jp. Instead, I had to register for a separate VPN account on StrongVPN. Even then, one of their Tokyo-based tunnel end points worked, and the other didn't. That's because Hulu works actively to detect these servers and blocks access to them.

I started out using OpenVPN as well. However, the speed and latency was always very bad even though my VPS connection is fast.After spending too much time trying to figure it out, I decided to just spend just $55/year and use StrongVPN.

PureVPN - disable all encryption by default for performance on their Windows client - for example. StrongVPN I recall logging. Other popular ones recur billing at top whack after a year and refusing refund.

Internet is pretty good here (and everywhere else I've been -- way better than the average coffee shop / hotel / etc internet in the US). I use StrongVPN and haven't had any problems yet.

Don’t use strongVPN. They shared my info.