Gradual removal of port forwarding from the IVPN service

www.ivpn.net Gradual removal of port forwarding from the IVPN service

Protecting the interest of our customers and ensuring the stability of the service have been key principles for IVPN since starting our operations more than ten years ago. To keep delivering on these promises, we have made the decision to gradually phase out the port forwarding feature from the IVPN...

So IVPN is also removing port forward. Who's next?

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Rimozione graduale del port forwarding dal servizio IVPN

www.ivpn.net /blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/

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Gradual removal of port forwarding from the IVPN service

www.ivpn.net /blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/

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43 comments

I hoped this wouldn't happen but saw it coming from a mile away, honestly. I think, as OP said in another comment, we're going to see the rest of the better VPNs (an already short list - what is it now, just AirVPN and maybe Proton?) slowly take away this feature as well.
My Mullvad subscription runs out in a few days. Think I'll be using the extra monthly $5 to upgrade my seedbox plan and ditch home seeding entirely.

I moved from mullvad when they dropped port forwarding and moved to ivpn only now to find they have dropped it to.
I think I will hang fire a little while now and see how things play out before having the rug pulled again. Is there going to come a time when none them offer port forwarding?
- What about i2p torrenting?
  
  Yup, AFAIK you do not need a port forward to torrent within the I2P network. And in addition you wouldn't even need a VPN. The main downside is that I2P needs more people torrenting so that it'll go faster.
  
  I know nothing about i2p isn't it going to depend on everyone using i2p?
  
  is there a guide for torrenting with i2p ?
  
  I heard its slower?
- I have a feeling that this will happen to the "good" ones. I wish there was another way to seed properly without portforward.
  
  I think you might be right. I may just end up getting a seed box of some description

With all the sites and release groups that have shut down recently there seems to be something big occurring. It looks like this might be the gradual shut down of open trackers chaps. IVPN was the choice for services for years; will have to see what happens from here. I felt comfortable using their service; however this changes my self hosting. Usenet from here on out? IRC? Where do we go from here?

Seems like another blow and a step closer to the death of public trackers for many. For us hardcore pirates we don’t give a shit but the big corps are gonna be very happy. Many people should probably just move on to Usenet

I don't even know what I'd use a VPN service without port forwarding for.
- useful to bypass geoblocks
  
  Except that most services have started blocking VPN IP addresses.

Can someone enlighten me to why people are port forwarding? Just wondering what everyone is doing that different from me.
- To be able to connect to someone, one of them needs to have a port forwarded. If you forward it, you can connect to everyone. If not, then you can only connect to those who have done it. This is especially a problem on almost dead torrents with a few or less peers only

The paid ProtonVPN has port-forwarding for its Windows app, not for Linux yet though.
- If you download a wireguard/openVPN conf file from Proton it will let you enable nat-pmp which is basically automatic port forwarding. It seems to work fine on a Linux machine running qbittorrent, but your case might be different.
- Proton has its issues. Cant use killswitch together with split tunneling and not all servers have port forwarding enabled
  
  This is fine with me. Kill switches aren't perfect so I just have QBit bound to the VPN so it won't run without it.
  
  Yes, but can they handle the influx of people coming for port forwarding with their servers? This seems to be why IVPN has claimed they are not offering it; and removing the feature from paid subscribers. There is a lack of logic in removing it from existing clients who renew each year.

Windscribe supports ephemeral port forwarding on its paid plans and permanent port forwarding on its static IP plans. They have a 44% off sale currently.
- The product description is a bit awkward:
  No Identifying Logs We can't personally identify you based on IP and timestamp
  This is why they go to your provider and asking whom this IP belongs to. They basically sey that they log your stuff
  
  I don't understand. Are you talking about the static IPs? They are not dedicated. They are still shared, so Windscribe cannot pinpoint individual users on them.
  
  Their whole product looks weird: it just looks like you can pay extra money to ensure you get the same exit IP every time.
  I don't know WHAT the use case is for that, but if people want to give someone money for it, might as well take it.

As of today (29 June 2023), Port forwarding is not offered for new customers as part of the Pro plan. Further, existing IVPN Pro customers cannot reserve new ports. Existing reservations will stay in place, and can be disabled by manual action.
We are disabling all reserved ports and completely remove this feature from our service on 30 September 2023.

Damn IVPN has always been a solid provider. No public missteps and supported XMR earlier than all (reputable) others including mullvad.
Time to switch to i2p and usenet at least until the next p2p protocol comes about.

43 comments