Underrated VPNs

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VPNs have been very much in the news in recent months, in view of the well publicized developments in the monitoring and control of social media by governments. I'm particularly concerned at the focus on YouTube by the way, of which I'm a serious addict, and which I'd never even realized was 'social media'.

All the VPN recommendations I see appear to revolve around Nord, Mullvad, Proton and Express, but as a 'parsimonious' person , I'm more interested in those programs which have viable free versions. At present, I'm using Windscribe, Privado and Hotspot Shield free VPNs, and first impressions are favourable. Windscribe and Privado give 10GB per month, and Hotspot (of which I'd never heard 24 hours ago) seems to be unlimited.

Anyone else got experience of these lesser known VPNs, and are there any downsides of which one should be aware?

^ In addition, I also use the Browsec and Opera browser extensions, which are not apparently regarded as proper VPNs, but are exceptionally simple to set up and use, and appear to do the basic stuff very well.

https://protonvpn.com/pricing has a viable free version too. Be cautious of browser extension VPNs ... they snoop.

I've also been testing Hide.Me

https://hide.me/en/pricing

The free version is just fine with no account details which is nice.

Have you looked at Planet VPN? That was on my shortlist as well.

https://freevpnplanet.com/

^Never heard of it until you posted this ... will test asap.

Just keep in mind ... if its "free" YOU are the product ... just remember that much. If you have an old computer around you can always set up an virtual private server with only 2GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 will suffice. For the most part, unless I'm super paranoid, I go raw as I'm hiding in plain sight. Blend into the crowd with Windows 10 and Chrome 'out of the box' no changes nor modifications. Not for the 'faint of heart' though.

Not impressed with Planet VPN. Loses connection too easily and doesn't facilitate the downloading of YouTube videos. That one's off the list, then.

I've been having good luck with hide.me

I had Hide Me on an older laptop running Windows 8.1 and found it very competent, if a little intrusive. It used to activate and impose itself on my internet browsing whether I wanted it to or not.

I tried to transfer my account to my present Windows 10 laptop, but had forgotten my user name and password, and all efforts to contact the app have been unsuccessful.

Very annoyed to find that Windscribe has reduced its monthly allowance from 10GB to 2GB on its free version. This makes it unviable in my view. Presumably it's to 'persuade' users to switch to the paid version. Not interested, folks!

I also gave up on Windscribe now as I can not afford to pay.

I used to use one years ago called Private Internet Access, PIA for short. It was recommended a bit in the file-sharing community like torrent sites PIA did not keep logs of which IP addresses their users had. If PIA ever got court ordered to turn over a user's record they would not have anything identifiable to turn over. PIA offered lots of membership deals where the monthly cost is super cheap if paying upfront like paying once a year or once every three years. PIA worked very well for me.

I quit using PIA a couple years ago after my last three year membership ran out. I had used them for like a decade. My girlfriend has been buying a family plan of Norton antivirus & firewall every year that I've been installing one on my desktop & Norton started including a VPN feature. I don't have a lot of money to spare on a VPN since I have Norton anyways & I can use their VPN. I have the location set for file-sharing. Norton VPN can be a bit glitchy, at least on my old Windows 7 computer. Sometimes their VPN can not turn on. Norton recently updated it & I had changed the VPN settings to be a lot more private than I could with the previous version & the VPN started majorly hogging my ram & processor to the point where my computer would freeze. I had to turn my computer off by pressing the power button on top the tower. Changing the VPN settings back to be more like the previous version fixed the resource hogging. I think I fixed the not being able to connect issue by disabling the VPN to come on when I restart my computer. After my computer fully boots up I manually turn the VPN on & it connects OK, so far anyways. I occasionally have to turn the VPN off to access certain sites because it triggers the site's security spam/scam/bot/troll protection. I also sometimes have to turn the VPN off or change the settings to access certain adult sites because the sites think I might be around Texas. There's a recent Texas law requiring adult sites to verify visitors age & identity which is a major privacy risk considering how many sites get hacked these days. That policy is only for the visitors in Texas. I'm pretty sure a bit of people living in Texas started using VPNs & changing their region setting to get around that.

Yeah, and how can we be sure there are no logs?