Are some VPNs better than others for Torrents (paid VPN)

VPN
1

I use PIA (Private Internet Access) when running qB. I had a knowledgeable friend tell me that ExpressVPN is better for torrent use.

Anyone here have any specific knowledge on this subject? I don’t know that I’m having any problems, but OTOH, since PIA is the only one I’ve used, I wouldn’t necessarily know if I had any problems.

PIA is $40/yr , ExpressVPN is $100/yr.

2

Mullvad is the best.

Edit: Not anymore Removing the support for forwarded ports

3

Proton’s port forwarding seems to work well, so I’m just gonna keep using it ig? I’m honestly not sure what makes a good torrenting experience when it comes to that stuff

4

I can saturate my 1Gbit connection torrenting with PIA WG connected. Port forwarding works pretty good, although I needed a bit of scripting to integrate it with qBittorrent.

I will keep using PIA.

5

I use PIA, no problem.

6

I moved to NordVPN from pia. I got better speeds with nord and I was having odd issues with pia when I was up for renewal

7

The only VPN I’ve ever used is mullvad and I have no reason to switch, really solid choice and I love that you can pay by the month, and it’s not an automatic renewal, so if you don’t use it and forget about it, your not wasting your money.

8

I’ve been using AirVPN running through a Wireguard/Gluetun Docker container on my NAS with qBittorrent. No issues. It’s been working flawlessly.

9

I’ve used TorGuard for over 10 years now, no issues at all and I can max out my 1 gig internet. $60/yr

10

Mullvad with a peer in my own city has had as much as 450Mbit/s thruput (and in both directions) using Wireguard.

11

Definitely way better than Surfshark (that’s the only two I tried, now sticking with mullvad), only minor gripe is the random port generation with mullvad, then you must configure qbittorrent to use the same port number. Makes it a little harder to manage.

12

I enhanced run_setup.sh to be standalone (I.e. use a .env file to set up the variables), but I’m yet to enrich it to push the port forward number to qBit.
If you’ve done it already, would you mind sharing?

13

Are you still using mullvad with the new removal of port forwarding? I’m worried about speeds once they disable it for good.

14

Sure here is the script that goes into the initd.qbittorrent folder of my container. It reads the port number (which was dumped on a file from my VPN container) and manually changes the config file of qbt.

#!/bin/bash
# Wait for 20 seconds
sleep 20
# Read the new port number from the file
new_port=$(cat /shared/new_port)
# Search for the line that contains "Session\Port=" and replace the port number with the new port number
awk -v new_port="$new_port" '/Session\\Port=/ {gsub(/[0-9]+/, new_port)} {print}' /config/qBittorrent/qBittorrent.conf > /tmp/qBittorrent.conf
awk_result=$?
if [ $awk_result -eq 0 ]; then
mv /tmp/qBittorrent.conf /config/qBittorrent/qBittorrent.conf
echo "Successfully updated port number to $new_port."
else
echo "Failed to update port number in file."
fi

There is a more “elegant” option of doing this with an API call, but I like this bc the client is not even initiated and loads up with the correct config. Otherwise it will initiate connections and then change the port, nah.

15

Still using it, I probably get about 80% of my regular speed