I have been considering getting https://www.privateinternetaccess.com . I know Tek Syndicate has mentioned and said it is pretty good, but those videos were a few months old, and I haven't found a current article or video about it. But I have heard that the speed and tech support have gone to shit in the past few months and you should look elsewhere for a VPN. I am not sure if this is true, but if anyone using PIA could give some input on this that would be great.
And my ISP is Centurylink if that helps in anyway.
I am going to give my opinion on PIA. Been using it for a while. Put your tinfoil hat on. I think comcast has figured out which connections run through PIA and randomly throttle/black magic sacrifice unicorns to fuck with your connection. Youtube buffers with PIA on, but not when off. Makes no sense to me and that is my only conclusion.
I've been using PIA for a while, and while I'm not unhappy with them, they do have their moments. Sometimes the internet will crawl, but it's usually at odd hours of the night in my time zone, and I usually connect to a server on the otherside of the country 3000 miles away. Depending on how private I want to be, I'll either connect to a different server, or just not use it at all. More often than not, PIA is faster than AT&T, but it does break a few sites, most noteably Steam. There are sites that will flat out prevent your from logging in, purchasing, or even utilizing their services if they detect you're using a VPN/Proxy (Twitch).
There are definitely pros/cons to any VPN, and the fact that we *need* one to get a decent experience on the internet is sad. Even more sad that some sites will prevent you from protecting your privacy in the name of "security"
Works pretty good as poster below said if you change servers, connection can improve. I'm stuck with comcastic internet so I won't be leaving PIA anytime soon. Steam plays nice with it, but there is about a one second delay on css servers with 30 ms ping as reported by server. Sometimes I forget to turn it off. Worth it for netflix, but ymmv.
I've only noticed the Twitch issue but that was a month or two ago...since then, I've been fine (oddly enough).
Steam Store page breaks sometimes, to be specific. Gaming is perfectly fine (as long as you're on a respectable server). It's not the VPN that's the issue, I think there's a security feature that prevents you from purchasing a product when your credit card is stationed in your country and your connection is in another...Perhaps there are black-listed servers from PIA because people have hacked Steam accounts with it. Who knows...
I don't have many issues with it to be honest. The only time it becomes inconvenient is when I want a file downloaded at 5.5MB/s, oppose to 1-2MB/s. A quick reconnect to the country normally load balances me to another server.
For the price you pay, it's way better in many ways than one over free VPNs and most certainly better than not using one at all.
I don't ever experience it crawling...this sounds like it might be an issue outside of the VPN. Perhaps simply a shitty ISP?
usually I can sustain a 50Mb connection with PIA although sometimes it drops below 100Kb/s and I won't even be able to stream a youtube video. Connecting to other nodes due to my location can add quite a bit of latency so sometimes I will even just turn it off. I would say 85% I have no issue the other 15%, either some networking problem or not enough bandwidth to even stream.