Reply To: VPN recommendation (East Asia)

[Jon]

I found NordVPN to be excellent for many years, until it wasn’t. I use Surfshark now, though I imagine I’ll have to find another at some point in the future.

The issue as far as I can tell is that there seems to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse between the VPNs and the content providers and networks, and I suspect the quality of any given VPN depends on how much resource they’re putting into fighting that battle – changing their IP address pools etc.

Whichever VPN you use, you’ll probably regularly find that things stop working (e.g. BBC iPlayer refuses to let you watch something it was quite happy to show you yesterday). The solution usually is to refresh your connection (change the server, potentially even the country – although for iPlayer you’ll need to stick to UK). It can be incredibly frustrating, and may take a few refreshes, but persistence usually pays off.

So whichever VPN you go for, choose one that lets you choose the country, and even city, you want to appear to be located in, and gives you control over selection of things like server, IP address, VPN protocol… And has plenty of different servers to choose from – the more the better.

As an aside – Rob, your own site security is a victim of this – or perhaps a little overzealous… 😉 I (anyone else?) regularly get blocked and have to fiddle about with the VPN in order to get HfP to load…