There are already hundreds of VPN websites. Almost all of them are affiliate funnels with a ranking table at the top, and almost none of them tell you the one thing that matters: a VPN moves your trust, it does not remove it. You stop trusting your internet provider and start trusting a company you have never met.
This site exists to help you decide whether that trade is worth making, which company deserves it, and when you would be better off running the server yourself.
What you will find here
- How VPNs actually work — tunnels, DNS, routing and protocols, explained without either hand-waving or a cryptography lecture.
- How to evaluate a provider — ownership, jurisdiction, audit quality and logging claims, with a checklist you can apply yourself.
- How to build your own — complete WireGuard and OpenVPN builds on a VPS or a router, including the parts most tutorials skip.
- Everything around the tunnel — threat modelling, passwords and passkeys, browser hardening, encrypted messaging, device security.
- Leaks and breaches — DNS, IPv6 and WebRTC leak testing, fingerprinting, and what to do in the first hour after your data appears in a dump.
How we test
Every provider written about here is bought anonymously at retail price and tested on our own hardware. No press accounts, no review units, no early access in exchange for a publication date.
- Leak testing first. DNS, IPv6 and WebRTC on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. A provider that leaks does not get a speed test.
- Speed over a fixed method. Same line, same time windows, same servers, three protocols, ten runs each — baseline first, then tunnelled.
- Kill-switch behaviour under failure. We drop the tunnel deliberately and watch what escapes.
- Documentation and claims. Audit reports read in full, not the summary blog post. Corporate ownership traced. Terms read to the end.
- Everything published. Method, raw numbers and the date tested, so you can repeat it or challenge it.
If a review does not tell you how the number was produced, it is not a review — it is a placement.
Who writes this
Rasmus Holt
Rasmus spent eight years as a network engineer building and running VPN infrastructure for organisations where a misconfiguration was a serious incident rather than an inconvenience. He now writes about the consumer end of the same technology.
He runs his own WireGuard servers, reads audit reports properly, and has strong and slightly boring opinions about DNS. He sells nothing, coaches nobody, and does not accept paid reviews.
What this site will never do
- Rank providers by commission rate and call it a comparison.
- Publish a “best VPN” list that changes every time a payout changes.
- Claim that any tool makes you anonymous. Nothing on sale to consumers does that.
- Recommend a provider we have not paid for and tested ourselves.
How the site is funded
Some links to VPN providers and hosting companies are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission if you sign up through one — at no extra cost to you. Commission never affects a score, a ranking or a criticism, and providers who pay nothing are tested on identical terms. The full detail, including our testing method, is on the disclosure page.
Corrections
Security writing goes stale quickly. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us through the contact page — corrections are made quickly and dated, and we would rather be corrected than confident.