I won a free 30 day VPN key from a Voat, sponsored give away provided by “Private Internet Access.” Here is my review I agreed to give at the end of the trial. Please read. it’s not good, unfortunately.

If you are not aware, about one month ago, a company, Private Internet Access, was willing to do a sponsorship give away here on Voat. https://voat.co/v/Voat/3235210 I was lucky enough to be on at the time, and got my submission in on time to win. The stipulation was that, whoever won would give a review at the end of their trial period.

Let’s make something clear, I did not want to give a bad review to this VPN. They are (were?) an entity willing to take the risk of paying for advertisement on Voat. So it sucks it isn’t something I can endorse. I will try fail at being brief.

WHEN it works, it works well. “When” obviously being the important word to take away from it’s capitalization.

I thought saying that it “only worked %50 of the time” was a slight over exaggeration for the first two weeks of use. Nearly 30 days later, I am convinced it is an extreme under exaggeration.

Lets start with the good:

The API (what the user sees/uses too interact with the program) is simple, easy to use, and strait forward. I like that.

When it worked, it worked well, transmitting data at a very nice speed. I would, for most browsing, forget it was on. To include torrenting*. Those connections would also last hours, the entire time it was connected, without flaw. LOVED THAT.

They have a lot of servers all over the world, with at least 6 that were close enough, to be under 100ms.

When a connection failed, the application does not let data through, which is good if you don’t want a failure to expose you.

That’s it for good.

The Bad:

THE SHIT DOESN’T WORK FOR MORE THAN HALF THE TIME, AND EVEN ONCE CRASHED IN WAY THAT POSSIBLY EXPOSED ME.

Lets break down the normal experience. I try to connect to a server; EVERY time it would say I was connected, but only half the time it would give me an IP. Of that half success rate that would give an IP, only half of THAT time would it pass data. Why the fuck should anyone pay for a service only working %25 time they try to use it? This wasn't just a single server issue, it was a problem trying to connect to multiple servers in search of a working connection.

*Torrenting... This fucking VPN would slow down the moment a torrent port was used, even for Bitchute! Fuck me if I tried an actual torrent. this would be after using it normally for a decent time. To be fair, once it decided to accept torrent connections, it would work fine, but go ahead and roll that dice, chances are, your connection was fucked and you get to start all over.

The one, and only one time it crashed, it was while I had torrents running, and the connections defaulted to my actual IP. My ISP already warned me once when I didn’t use a VPN, and that was for all of 3 torrents. I don’t torrent, and really did it again to stress test this VPN. Now I get to wait around to see if I get fucked because of it.

DO NOT PAY FOR “Private Internet Access” (PIA) VPN. It is garbage.

I plan to repost this again tomorrow (Friday) at a better time, as well as Saturday. Verbatim (nearly.) I don’t care about the up/down voats, I care that Goats are informed about this shit.

I tried contacting @Puttitout via PM before this business week, attempting to get a rep to fix this shit, and again yesterday; Nope ( and I get his shit if flooded but it was a reply to his PM, I would think it would stick out.) I also submitted a help ticket with PIA to get a hold of me via PM (through Putt.) Nope. I really didn’t want to give a Voat sponsor a bad review, but if Putt wont do a quality check on a sponsor that he himself shilled, than why the fuck should I, or any Goat trust any other sponsor?

Again, I wanted for this too be good so I could encourage the sponsor to stick around with a good review, but I wont lie for that hope alone.

EDIT: I said the "%75 normal experience", rereading, that doesn't completely make sense. I guess I meant that %75 or the %100 experience was bad, which is better explained after. Removed the %75 part.