ProtonVPN - fast & free

ProtonVPN

Not sure any of you are aware of Proton Mail which is a fully secure email service and has been around for a while. I signed up for their free tier email service a while back but never used it since I don’t want to pay for yet another cloud space and the free tier space of 500 MB is not much for daily use.

Anyway, I know they had VPN for free as well but never tried it until recently and I am blown away by the speed --- very low overhead compared to different VPN service I have used. Granted it is wireguard, a modern successor of VPN but still, literally I get same speed as provided by my ISP. First, I could not believe and started measuring speed with every speed test tool that is out there and they all came back with more or less same and speed which is roughly same as what I get with my ISP  (see screenshot) without VPN layer. At this point, there is absolutely no reason to not use them permanently… and it's Free!

How to get ProtonVPN

Head out to https://proton.me and sign-up for free account and you get encrypted mail service and 1 VPN connection free. Wireguard is pretty simple to use, all you have to do is install wireguard (https://www.wireguard.com/install/ ) and get the credentials/keys from ProtonVPN and off you go. 

How to run wireguard (MacOS or Linux)

After wireguard is installed, follow the simple steps shown in screenshot below to start/stop wireguard. The screenshot is on macOS but it should be same in Linux possibly on windows under powershell as well. The third argument is the name of your wireguard configuration file without the '.conf' extension. In my case it is lion.conf. This is the configuration file you downloaded from the ProtonVPN and it should be copied to /usr/local/etc/wireguard/ on MacOS, or /etc/wiregaurd on Linux.