VPN

The VPN Wiki page displays some rules and recommendations for using a VPN service with PreToMe

The purpose of this guide is to discuss the issues of port forwarding and privacy protection practices of VPN providers, and other relevant issues to help choose a good VPN provider

Open ports:

AzireVPN users can choose to have a non-shared IP address (not static, but changes infrequently) without NAT and with all ports open. There is currently no extra charge for this, but a future price change will make the shared IP addresses cheaper. Because the non-shared IP address VPN connections have no NAT, the user is missing the implicit firewall provided by a NAT gateway. Users must take responsibility to implement an explicit firewall to close sensitive ports, especially the Windows file sharing ports

Port forwarding:

Some providers do support port forwarding, and can be recommended here:

AirVPN

Mullvad

TorGuard

Private Internet Access (PIA)

PrivateVPN (forwards one port only)

Windscribe

Some providers do not support port forwarding, and are not permitted at PreToMe:

NordVPN

IPVanish

iPredator

ExpressVPN

ProtonVPN

IP addresses - dynamic, shared, static
Some VPN providers offer a static IP address for an additional fee
It is not worth paying this additional fee
more notes to be written

Private Internet Access

This is the most popular provider, recommended by users in forums all over the Internet. In a sense, PIA is the McDonalds of VPN providers. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The biggest, most popular is not necessarily the best, but their customers love them

Most PIA VPN gateways do not support port forwarding. You must choose one of the port forwarding gateways before you can implement port forwarding

PIA port forwarding gateways are shared between many users. This means that your PIA IP address is very likely to match another PreToMe user's PIA IP address. You will both see a warning on your PreToMe profile page about IP address sharing. PreToMe is no longer punishing members who share an IP address, but we have not had the time to remove the warning from the Web server scripts

Windscribe

Port forwarding at Windscribe is only available if you purchase a static IP address for an extra fee of $24 per year. Only a few Windscribe gateways are available to port forwarding users

The Torrentfreak VPN review for 2019 has a question about port forwarding. Some companies did not answer the question. Their list is bigger than the list in this forum post:

https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-keep-you-anonymous-in-2019/

Privacy and logging:

At least two VPN providers have a history of exposing their customer details to authorities - HideMyAss and PureVPN. Search the news sites to read the details of these providers' betrayals

Torrentfreak has been running an annual VPN survey for several years. The survey questions are designed to discover which VPN providers are safe to use. Read the most recent survey. Note that HideMyAss and PureVPN are missing from the most recent Torrentfreak article

Most recent Torrentfreak VPN survey

https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-keep-anonymous-2018/

Notes about logging ...

This article has some information about the cases where PureVPN, EarthVPN and HideMyAss have revealed their customers' details

https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn-logs-lies/

More about HideMyAss

https://blog.hidemyass.com/en/lulzsec-fiasco

SOCKS proxies

A small number of PreToMe members are using SOCKS proxies. Some VPN providers offer a proxy an an alternative choice to VPN. There is no way to port forward through a SOCKS proxy. Equally important, many commercial SOCKS services frequently jump from proxy to proxy. This causes the IP address to change frequently. Bittorrent relies on periodic communication (usually once per 30 minutes per torrent) to tell the tracker the client's current IP address. The tracker passes the address to other peers. If your IP address changes every 2 or 3 minutes, the tracker will never have your current IP address. This will prevent your client from seeding

When you use a SOCKS proxy, dozens of IP addresses will appear on your profile, for example ...