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 Pro plan.
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 guess that means as more VPNs do this we need to spread the word on I2P then?
I know nothing about i2p isn’t it going to depend on everyone using i2p?
There are i2p trackers and the only way for torrents to get there is by crosseeding them (from clearweb), qbitorrent on the v6.0 release will make this easier.
And you can also just upload to i2p trackers directly.
I think this is definitely the way to go! Just waiting on qbit now. VPNs are starting to feel dated (to me) for torrent use, but still great for privacy.
I’m seeing more people move that direction. It’s worth keeping an eye on it.
is there a guide for torrenting with i2p ?
I heard its slower?
It is slower, but since it is a p2p network the more people that use it the faster it gets. (in theory) (sort of like seeding the network)
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
The problem with seedboxes is that you’re severely limited on storage space. If more VPN providers remove port forwarding and more people move to seedboxes, we’ll see every old torrent die off as people are only going go seed the newest content. You definitely need a balance of seedboxes and people like me with a 6TB HDD used solely for permaseeding on my home connection for both fast downloads and torrent longevity.
I’ve already made a comment ITT but I’d like to agree with you here and add on -
Not only this, but a lot of seedbox providers either restrict or outright disallow the use of public trackers on their services, both for DMCA-avoidance and also for fair usage policy compliance since slots are often shared (depending on provider & plan). Dedicated servers/slots that can mitigate the latter reason are more expensive and probably out of budget for a lot of torrenters (including myself).
I can see an increasing shift in seedbox usage if more VPNs remove port-forwarding (which I can also see happening - look at how fast IVPN removed it after Mullvad. If you’d allow me a doomer moment, we could be looking at zero good options for VPNs with port forwarding by the end of the year or next). What I can’t predict is how badly or how quickly losing these options will actually affect public tracker usage/torrent availability. I’m not sure if there are any numbers out there estimating how many people utilize VPNs and port forwarding with public torrents versus those who do not.
Regardless, these VPN changes aren’t good news for us… between this and RARBG going down, it’s been a disappointing last few months. I have found my home in a few private trackers and am focusing my efforts there to upload content that I care about, but that content will not reach the masses like the public torrents I soon may not be able to seed efficiently can.
At least the upside is that generally content still available will be faster to download with people using seedboxes