Torrenting is a P2P or Peer-to-Peer file-sharing technique that allows high-speed downloads by splitting files into smaller parts and downloading them simultaneously, rather than in one big item. While torrenting isn’t illegal, and there are legitimate uses, the majority of the content that is available through torrenting sites is copyrighted content being illegally distributed – as such, it’s often frowned upon.
In some countries, torrenting any content, even legal copyright-free material can result in copyright trolls suing in an attempt to scare users into settling out of court. To protect yourself from copyright trolls and other monitoring you can use a VPN to protect your privacy when browsing and torrenting.
You may be looking at the option of a free VPN to protect your data while torrenting. Generally, this isn’t a great idea, as a lot of free VPNs severely limit your download speed, have unusable small data caps, or actively log and sell your browsing history. None of these options are helpful when you’re wanting to torrent files fast and privately.
There are, however, a couple of VPN providers that stand out. They’re still not unlimited and free but they offer a more reasonable data cap or are very cheap.
Hide.me – Free 10GB/month
Hide.me offers a generous 10GB of monthly data to its free tier users. While this still isn’t all that much data, especially for torrenting, it’s better than most free VPN providers offer. Hide.me have a strong no-logs policy, meaning that they don’t track your VPN usage or sell any details to third parties. Torrenting is allowed on most of its servers, including all five of the servers available to free tier users.
Tip: If you’ve got limited VPN data and aren’t too concerned about the privacy of your normal browsing activity, you should only enable your VPN when torrenting. This will help you save data for when you need it.
Windscribe – Free (up to) 15GB/month
Windscribe offers a very generous amount of data to its free tier users. You can get 2GB a month with an anonymous account if you confirm an email address this is increased to 10GB a month. Windscribe also offers a “Tweet-4-Data” scheme where you can get an additional 5GB of monthly data for tweeting at its twitter account. In total, you can get 15GB of free monthly VPN data. Further referral and affiliate bonuses are available as well as occasional promotions, contests, and giveaways on its subreddit. Full details of Windscribe’s free tier data allowances are available here, but it’s safe to say that no other VPN provider offers the same amount of data to its free users. with so few restrictions or drawbacks.
Windscribe supports torrenting on most of its servers, those servers that don’t support it are clearly marked with a struck-through “P2P” icon. Configuration guides for a number of torrent clients are available on their website, so you don’t have to worry about your client not connecting properly. A no-logs policy ensures that Windscribe does not monitor or sell any of your VPN data.
Surfshark – Unlimited data from $1.94/month
For those of you that need more than 15GB of monthly data for torrenting, and don’t want to mess around with multiple accounts. Surfshark offers one of the cheapest paid VPN services around, while still offering top-notch features.
You can get a two-year-long plan for just $1.94 a month (paid up-front). For this price, you get unlimited data and access to more than 1700 servers in over 63 countries that all support P2P torrenting traffic. Other features include multi-hop options, a VPN kill switch, and unlimited devices on one licence, all covered with a strict no-logs policy.
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