Hi,
I’m looking into switching to paid ProtonVPN (and probably mail) when clients come out for mobile and mac. I’m currently using Freedome but it has a few bad features and I’ve been wondering if Proton could work better:
- When the computer boots up all the software connects normally to e.g. Skype, and only when the VPN client is started up and connected all the software disconnects and reconnects.
- Sometimes the VPN connection goes bad and disconnects(?) stealthily and I need to off and on the VPN client to make internet work again. Happens couple times a month on mobile and mac.
How has your experience been with ProtonVPN? Are these areas something where Proton would excel? I did read about the kill switch thing on their website but I’m not sure it include computer startup.
I have been very impressed with the quality of service. Even secure core - something quite unique to ProtonVPN - works flawlessly for me. I just haven’t had much luck with TOR servers, but that might be my configuration.
Of course, it’s still very light on features, but what’s there works very well.
Speeds are quite fine, most of the time:
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from UK Web.Solutions Direct (185.183.104.139)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by GGA Maur (Binz) [5.88 km]: 32.686 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 239.22 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 21.59 Mbit/s
Speeds are very good, can get roughly the same speeds as I pay for at my ISP. The VPN program occasionally crashes but I’d say the overall experience is very good. The killswitch feature sometimes bugs out when the program crashes and leaves your internet connection in freefall on an open connection but like I said, overall very good. Guess it takes a bit of time to bugfix and polish until it’ll become stable 
I love this service, i get some of the best speeds ive ever had with a vpn this includes secure core which is great considering it goes through 2 servers and now the killswitch bug has been fixed in the new update this is my go to vpn. Some say the price is a bit high, but i dont mind paying for a quality service with a real honest transparent privacy policy that pretty much every other vpn lacks, that alone is a big point for me.
Love the service Proton , you have my support, nice work.
You need a VPN solution built into the OS like IKEv2 to work around this. Once they offer IKEv2 (if you’re on Windows or Mac) you can schedule it to start at boot, without waiting for a 3rd party program to be started by the OS.
This is still not ideal. If you want to be 100% secure run your traffic through a router that maintains a connection to Proton and drops anything else, but it’s still better than 3rd party clients needing to start on your OS.
Honestly, not great. Their servers that claim to support “P2P” traffic don’t. I’ll notice when torrenting (even legitimate torrents) that my connection randomly cuts off. I’ll stay connected to the VPN, however I have no internet access out of it, and am unable to reconnect to the server for random periods of time.
It makes me wonder if their claims to allow P2P traffic/not log are actually true
Mostly good (though based on the server loads the additional servers Plus opens up to you seem more loaded than the ones Basic users get access to…) except the kill switch has caused me nothing but issues. It always goes something like this:
- Sleep computer while still connected
- Wake computer
- Connection might not be working
- Disconnect
- Cannot reconnect, the connection fails to initialise (and once this caused the app to crash, skipping to step 8)
- Restarting app doesn’t help.
- Try restarting service
- Now logged out of app and unable to log in with an error response of ___
- Restart computer and pray ProtonVPN fails to start with Windows, otherwise I can’t get in and have to uninstall it.
So my experiences with kill switch have been disappointing so far. And it doesn’t necessarily play nice with sleep, and even if the connection is back on resume, Windows will constantly report that there’s a problem with the connection (but troubleshooter can’t find anything).
ProtonVPN is one of the first programs that start on my computer. I didn’t do anything else than ticked the “launch on system start” checkbox, so that works perfectly.
I have better speeds with it than with other VPN Services I tried.
Killswitch is weird… When I tried it (I don’t use it typically) it killed my connection but never brought it back up. I had to manually reconnect. Not sure if it should be like that.
Rest works fine. Some features are still missing (IKEv2, native clients) but overall it’s usable.
Thanks everyone for answers, it does look promising.
I’ll have to keep an eye out on this forum to find out if the software continues to work for everyone. Would be nice to have a VPN that would just work 
.
Plus of course the mail account thats included in the visionary package hehe.
Its worked very well for me, the only problem I had was when I was using the wrong open vpn.
Awesome, thanks, sounds very promising.
I’ve thought about using a router occasionally but since I’m not always home it doesnt really work for me.
Thanks,
I’ll have to keep an eye out on if they manage to work on these problems. Probably need to subscribe to my current vpn for another year though.
my torrenting works just fine, maybe your configuration?
Thanks, this is very helpful.
Definitely not yet a service you could recommend to your friend, but hopefully they will get there! I’ll have to continue the subscription to my current vpn.
Visionary will become even more lucrative with ProtonDrive. You will get this as well when it’s out.
I guess it’s possible? I’m not doing anything funny though. Running the windows client and hitting connect to servers with the P2P flag set.
Damn, i wonder what they have in mind for that.
I currently use resilio sync for most of my stuff since local syncing is much more effective.
I bet it’s an end2end encrypted cloud storage 
.