What VPN services is good besides NordVPN and ExpressVPN?

Happy Hopping

Happy Hopping

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 1, 2004
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I would like to sign up w/ ExpressVPN, but they want me to flash my router w/ their firmware. I'm happy to do so, but I don't have their router. I have a router very similar but not the exact model. They have:

Asus
RT-AC68U (up to v3)
RT-AC87U
RT-AC56R
RT-AC56S
RT-AC56U

and I have Asus RT-AC66U B1, and they told me that I have to have the above models for their firmware to work

now, I can buy 1 of the above router, but surprisingly they are not cheap, about $150 for the lowest one. So for now, I'm looking for another VPN service that can support my router

I heard of Shark VPN but I don't know if their service is any good or not. Anyone has any suggestion on VPN
 
Mullvad is good. But if you like to torrent, they recently removed their port forwarding feature. Proton is also a good VPN and has portforwarding, so I switched to them and have been satisfied.
 
Mullvad if you don't need port forwarding.
Private Internet Access if you do.

I know PIA got bought out by CyberGhost owner which is a little sketchy, and some people will advise against it. But they open source all their apps on GitHub, provide decent speeds, and I have seen no evidence that they do logging or provide any information to anyone requesting it (e.g. governments or law enforcement)
 
PIA service is very poor, I signed up w/ them 2 yr. ago, I never been able to setup my Open VPN file as they have no tutorial link, and email reply is poor. W/ Express VPN, they have video on the step by step.

1 thing I'm very impressed w/ Express VPN, is: if I flash my router w/ their firmware, they guarantee there is no chance of DNS leak, so I don't need to download any application software from them to my Roku to prevent any DNS link

I wonder if Mullvad has the same function
 
Alternatively rent an Amazon EC2 instance and roll your own.
 
Happy Hopping said:
PIA service is very poor, I signed up w/ them 2 yr. ago, I never been able to setup my Open VPN file as they have no tutorial link, and email reply is poor.
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They literally have tutorials for DD-WRT, Merlin, Pfsense and OpenWRT/LEDE routers. With minimal research, you can set it up on other devices too and learn networking along the way. 🤷‍♂️

edit: you don't need to "flash" your router to some BS proprietary firmware crap. Use OPNsense/pfSense (or the above ones) and just configure an OpenVPN/Wireguard tunnel. You can do cool stuff like make a separate WiFi SSID for using the VPN connection or even choose to just route certain clients through it on your subnet.
 
Last edited:
Dopamin3 said:
They literally have tutorials for DD-WRT, Merlin, Pfsense and OpenWRT/LEDE routers. With minimal research, you can set it up on other devices too and learn networking along the way. 🤷‍♂️

edit: you don't need to "flash" your router to some BS proprietary firmware crap. Use OPNsense/pfSense (or the above ones) and just configure an OpenVPN/Wireguard tunnel. You can do cool stuff like make a separate WiFi SSID for using the VPN connection or even choose to just route certain clients through it on your subnet.
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you know what ExpressVPN said to me on that?

this is from their email, let me know what you think:

1. When you connect to ExpressVPN, your device will only use DNS servers operated entirely by ExpressVPN. Preventing your real DNS from
leaking.

2. We do have .OVPN files that you can upload to your Asus router, however, we recommend flashing our firmware if you do not want to risk
getting DNS leaks as the risk is higher for manually configured VPN.
Click to expand...
 
Happy Hopping said:
you know what ExpressVPN said to me on that?

this is from their email, let me know what you think:
Click to expand...
If you configure it correctly, you can prevent DNS leaks. Setting up a VPN on a firewall/router doesn't require a specific VPN provider. You can do it with any provider that provides you with an OpenVPN or Wireguard config. A misconfigured VPN can easily leak DNS and even transmit traffic if the VPN goes down.

I would skip a consumer router for what you want to do. I guess you might be able to get by with one that supports third party custom firmware that gives more options but I'm way out of the loop on this. With OPNsense/pfSense it's definitely achievable and there's lots of resources online. But if you don't want to spend time (and probably additional money on the firewall hardware?) then I guess go with a reputable provider that gives you the firmware and/or router directly since they're guaranteeing it's setup properly.
 
okay, I'll go w/ what you guys said. Now, to prevent DNS leak, after I config. my router properly w/ the correct OVPN file, (I only need 1 profile), do I still need an App for my Roku Ultra to prevent DNS leak?
 
Happy Hopping said:
okay, I'll go w/ what you guys said. Now, to prevent DNS leak, after I config. my router properly w/ the correct OVPN file, (I only need 1 profile), do I still need an App for my Roku Ultra to prevent DNS leak?
Click to expand...
No, you don't need anything on clients to prevent DNS leaks. If it is configured properly, when they pull a DHCP address you will be fine. However it is likely more involved than just configuring the OpenVPN tunnel.

OPNsense has documentation on preventing DNS leaks with VPN tunnels. This guide assumes you are using a WireGuard VPN rather than OpenVPN and obviously using OPNsense and not another firewall platform, but the information can still be relevant.

Before you connect your Roku to it and just assume it works, I would recommend performing some extended tests on https://dnsleaktest.com using a computer on the network.
 
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