Tech
There Are Hundreds of VPNs, But I Only Recommend These 6
VPNs, Compared
Other VPNs We’ve Tested
EventVPN is the new hotness in the VPN world. It’s a free, ad-supported VPN that comes from ExpressVPN. Ads and VPNs don’t really mix, but EventVPN says it’s able to offer a free service via Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), basically allowing it to serve ads without harvesting your personal data. The problem is the pervasiveness of ads. A banner lives at the top of the app at all times, and you’ll need to sit through a 30-second ad each time you connect or disconnect; a big problem when some servers posted unreasonably slow speeds. I’ll admit that EventVPN is a unique concept, but I see nothing about it that’s better than ProtonVPN or Windscribe for a free VPN service. And when it comes to the inconvenience of sitting through ads, it’s straight-up worse.
Private Internet Access (PIA) has a long history in the VPN space, and it’s maintained a track record of defending user privacy—even in the face of actual criminal activity. In 2016, a criminal complaint was filed in Florida against Preston Alexander McWaters for threats made online. McWaters was eventually convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators traced the online threats back to PIA’s servers and subpoenaed the company. As the complaint reads, “A subpoena was sent to [Private Internet Access] and the only information they could provide is that the cluster of IP addresses being used was from the east coast of the United States.” McWaters engaged in several other identifying activities, according to the complaint, but PIA wasn’t among them. Despite such a clear view of a VPN provider upholding its no-logging policy, PIA didn’t impress me during my tests. It’s slightly more expensive than a lot of our top picks, and it delivered the worst speeds out of any VPN I tested, with more than a 50 percent drop on the closest US server. (Windscribe, for context, only dropped 15.6 percent of my speed.)
MysteriumVPN is the go-to dVPN, or decentralized VPN, as far as I can tell. The concept of a decentralized VPN has existed for a while, but it’s really gained traction over the last couple of years. The idea is to have a network of residential IP addresses that make up the network, routing your traffic through normal IP addresses to get around the increasingly common block lists for VPN servers. Mysterium accomplishes this network with MystNodes. It’s a crypto node. People buy the node to earn crypto, and they’re put into the Mysterium network. It’s not inherently bad, but routing your traffic through a single residential IP is a little worrisome. Even without the decentralized kick, Mysterium was slow, and it doesn’t maintain any sort of privacy materials, be it a third-party audit, warranty canary, or transparency report.
PrivadoVPN is one of the popular options to recommend as a free VPN. It offers a decent free service, with a handful of full-speed servers and 10 GB of data per month. You’ll have to suffer through four—yes, four—redirects begging you to pay for a subscription before signing up, but the free plan works. The problem is how new PrivadoVPN is. There’s no transparency report or audit available, and although the speeds are decent, they aren’t as good as Proton, Windscribe, or Surfshark. PrivadoVPN isn’t bad, but it’s hard to recommend when Proton and Windscribe exist with free plans that are equally as good.
VPNs to Avoid
You’ll find dozens of free VPNs all claiming to protect your privacy. Most of them don’t. There are plenty of VPNs I don’t recommend, but these are a few I’ve tested worth mentioning.
Hola is an infamous name in the VPN industry, but it’s been close to a decade since its very public debacle. Hola is free, and it’s able to stay free because it uses a peer-to-peer network. Hola also owns Bright Data (formerly Luminati), which is a data collection company. In 2015, Hola sold access to the network of its free users (via Luminati), which was used in a distributed denial-of-service attack on 8chan. It’s been a decade since that incident, but Hola still operates in a similar way. If you don’t pay, you could be used as an exit node in Bright Data’s network, and the privacy policy makes it clear that Hola logs data about your usage, including your IP address, the pages you visit, and timestamps.
X-VPN is available on desktop, but it primarily shows up in results on the Apple App Store and Google Play, targeting mobile users with a free offering. X-VPN hasn’t done anything explicitly wrong like Hola, but it has way too many inconsistencies to recommend. For starters, it uses a proprietary VPN protocol, which it obfuscates within the app. Proprietary protocols like NordVPN’s NordLynx and ExpressVPN’s Lightway are based on existing, open source protocols. Further, X-VPN was highlighted in a Tech Transparency Project report about free VPNs with links to the Chinese government; X-VPN is based in Hong Kong. There’s no smoking gun with X-VPN, but there doesn’t need to be. The speeds aren’t the best, the app lacks basic features like split tunneling, and the pricing for a paid plan is in line with top providers.
How We Test VPNs
Functionally, a VPN should do two things: keep your internet speed reasonably fast, and actually protect your browsing data. That’s where I focused my testing. Extra features, a comfy UI, and customization settings are great, but they don’t matter if the core service is broken.
Speed testing requires spot-checking, as the time of day, the network you’re connected to, and the specific VPN server you’re using can all influence speeds. Because of that, I always set a baseline speed on my unprotected connection directly before recording results, and I ran the test three times across both US and UK servers. With those baseline drops, I spot-checked at different times of the day over the course of a week to see if the speed decrease was similar.
Security is a bit more involved. For starters, I checked for DNS, WebRTC, and IP leaks every time I connected to a server using Browser Leaks. I also ran brief tests sniffing my connection with Wireshark to ensure all of the packets being sent were secured with the VPN protocol in use.
On the privacy front, the top-recommended services included on this list have been independently audited, and they all maintain some sort of transparency report. In most cases, there’s a proper report, but in others, such as Windscribe, that transparency is exposed through legal proceedings.
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Two of Big Tech’s most influential billionaires, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, will go head-to-head in a highly anticipated trial beginning April 27. In Musk v. Altman, a judge, advised by a jury, will ultimately determine whether OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity, and the ruling could influence how the world’s leading AI developer controls and distributes its technology. For now, you can learn more about the trial here.
On the Panel
On May 8, a panel of WIRED experts will go live to answer your questions about this consequential case.
- Zoë Schiffer: WIRED’s director of business and industry, who oversees coverage of business and Silicon Valley.
- Maxwell Zeff: a senior writer at WIRED covering the business of artificial intelligence. He writes the weekly Model Behavior newsletter, which focuses on the people, communities, and companies behind Silicon Valley’s AI scene.
- Paresh Dave: a senior writer at WIRED covering the inner workings of Big Tech companies. He writes about how apps and gadgets are built and about their impacts while giving voice to the stories of the underappreciated and disadvantaged.
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Service provider Blackbox Hosting has consolidated storage from two full racks down to just 8U of rack space following migration to Everpure FlashArray hardware. The move has allowed the provider to deliver “sovereign” cloud services with a 10:1 data reduction ratio and an 85% reduction in power utilisation.
Blackbox Hosting evolved over 14 years from a single rack to supporting more than 1,500 virtual machines (VMs), and has datacentre capacity at Canary Wharf with a secondary site in Slough.
The company operates a fully managed, sovereign (see box) model for major software suppliers including Iris Software Group, which supports payroll and financial management for approximately 60% of UK academies.
Blackbox previously relied on HPE 3PAR 8400 all-flash arrays. However, as the hardware approached end-of-life, the company faced mounting challenges.
“Support renewal costs were significant, and we had issues with HPE support,” said Matthew Burden, CEO at Blackbox Hosting. “We had a power supply failure in a DR site, and despite a four-hour SLA [service-level agreement], it took nearly two weeks to replace. They also began charging for firmware updates that were previously included.”
The 3PAR environment was cumbersome, said Burden, and required two full racks of hardware to manage the company’s near-petabyte scale.
When it looked for a more performant and dense alternative, Blackbox turned to Pure Storage, which recently rebranded as Everpure.
High density; ‘one-second’ RPO
Blackbox has deployed a range of Pure Storage FlashArray models across its two datacentres to support its active-passive high-availability design.
The deployment includes two FlashArray//X50 R3s, two X50 R4s, and two FlashArray//C20 units for file clusters.
The hardware supports predominantly Hyper-V and VMware VMs, running 90% Windows-based workloads, primarily SQL Server, plus Linux servers.
The transition from 3PAR to Pure has seen a dramatic consolidation of physical space. “We went from two entire racks filled with disks to two 4U boxes,” said Burden. “Our total provisioned storage is 998TB and we get a total reduction of 10:1. 3PAR had deduplication, but not compression on SSDs.”
Beyond space savings, the disaster recovery (DR) capabilities have seen a massive upgrade. Previously, the company’s recovery point objective (RPO) was limited to 15 minutes. “With Pure Storage, it is one second,” said Durden. “We replicate all 1,500 VMs to our backup datacentre. For a customer with 1,000 VMs, we can spin those up for quarterly testing and they are only one second out from live data.”
Performance and sustainability
The shift to non-volatile memory express-based flash has also provided a significant boost to the provider’s green credentials. Sustainability reports generated via Pure’s Evergreen dashboard show an 85% saving in power utilisation compared with the legacy HPE environment.
For the end users – which include major corporate energy, finance and transport organisations – the benefit is felt in application speed. “We’ve had clients with huge databases that were always slow with previous providers,” said Justin Field, commercial director at Blackbox. “They can pull data significantly faster now, which is a big play for us when competing against hyperscalers.”
Burden also highlighted the “zero-touch” operational simplicity of the new arrays. “The older arrays were very cumbersome; you had to know exactly what you were doing,” he said. “The Pure web interface is very simple, which makes the operational side much easier. Plus, with Evergreen, we don’t have to pull arrays out for upgrades. We can just put in new controllers as scale increases.”
A national housing shortage is straining finances and communities across the United States. In Massachusetts, at least 222,000 homes will have to be built in the next 10 years to meet the population’s needs. At the same time, there are numerous challenges in traditional construction. There’s a shortage of skilled construction workers. Most projects involve multiple contractors and subcontractors, adding complexity and lag time. And the construction process, as well as the buildings themselves, can be a major source of emissions that contribute to climate change.
Reframe Systems, co-founded by Vikas Enti SM ’20, uses robotics, software, and high-performance materials to address these problems. Founded in 2022, the company deploys microfactories that bring housing fabrication and production closer to the regions where the homes are needed. The first homes designed and manufactured in Reframe’s first microfactory have been fully built in Arlington and Somerville, Massachusetts.
Enti’s experiences in MIT System Design and Management (SDM) shaped the company from its start. “Learning how to navigate the system and finding the optimal value for each stakeholder has been a key part of the business strategy,” he says, “and that’s rooted in what I learned at SDM.”
Better tools for system-level problems
Enti applied to SDM’s master of science in engineering and management while he was working at Kiva Systems, overseeing its acquisition by Amazon and transformation into Amazon Robotics. He found that the SDM program’s fundamentals of systems engineering, system architecture, and project management provided him with the tools he needed to address system-level problems in his work.
While he was at MIT, Enti also served as an associate director for the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which offers students and researchers mentorship, feedback, and potential funding for their startup ideas. He realized that “there isn’t a single formula for how businesses start, or how long it takes to get them started,” he says, which helped shape his plans to start his own business.
Enti took a leave of absence from MIT to oversee the expansion of Amazon Robotics in Europe. He returned and completed his degree in 2020, writing his thesis on developing technology that could mitigate falls for elderly people. This instinct to use his education for a good cause resurfaced when his daughters were born. He wanted his future business to address a real-world problem and have a social impact, while also reducing carbon emissions.
Growing housing, shrinking emissions
Enti concluded that housing, with immediate real-world impact and a significant share of global carbon emissions, was the right problem to work on. He reached out to his colleagues Aaron Small and Felipe Polido from Amazon Robotics to share his idea for advanced, low-cost factories that could be deployed quickly and close to where they were needed. The two joined him as co-founders.
Currently, the microfactory in Andover, Massachusetts, produces structural panels, with robotics completing wall and ceiling framing and people completing the rest of the work, including wiring and plumbing. Eventually, Reframe hopes to automate more of the building process through further use of robotics. The modular construction process allows for reduced waste and disruption on the eventual home site. And the finished homes are designed to be energy-efficient and ready for solar panel installation. The company is set to start work soon on a group of homes in Devens, Massachusetts.
In addition to the Andover location, Reframe is setting up in southern California to help rebuild homes that were destroyed in the area’s January 2025 wildfires. The company’s software-assisted design process and the adjustability of the microfactories allows them to meet local zoning and building codes and align with the local architectural aesthetic. This means that in Somerville, Reframe’s completed buildings look like modernized versions of the neighboring three-story buildings, known locally as “triple-deckers.” On the other side of the country, Reframe’s design offerings include Spanish-style and craftsman homes.
“Housing is a complex systems problem,” Enti says, explaining the impact SDM has had on his work at Reframe. The methods and tools taught in the integrated core class EM.412 (Foundations of System Design and Management) help him tackle systems-level problems and take the needs of multiple stakeholders into account. The Reframe team used technology roadmapping as they devised their overall business plan, inspired by the work of Olivier de Weck, associate head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And lectures on project management from Bryan Moser, SDM’s academic director, remain relevant.
“Embracing the fact that this is a systems problem, and learning how to navigate the system and the stakeholders to make sure we’re finding the optimal value, has been a key part of the business strategy,” Enti says.
Reframe Systems is set to continue learning through iteration as they plan to expand their network of microfactories. The company remains committed to the core vision of sustainably meeting the country’s need for more housing. “I’m grateful we get to do this,” Enti says. “Once you strip away all the robotics, the advanced algorithms, and the factories, these are high-quality, healthy homes that families get to live in and grow.”
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