I would not use any VPN that is endorsed by the Chinese government. ExpressVPN isn't perfect, but no major issues unlike what I'm going through with Astrill at the moment. China aside, I still want to use a VPN over an unsecured connection like the hotel's wifi. Seems like the consensus is that its not reliable within China. If ExpressVPN works for you, great, I just have seen them and others who aren't registered with the Chinese government being cut off randomly.I would not use any VPN that is endorsed by the Chinese government. There are a few other possibilities depending on how technical you are and how much effort. There is a list of VPNs floating around somwhere which are authorized by the CCP but how private they truly are is definitely in doubt. The reason I ask is that most popular VPNs have that connectivity issue (as I said, TGFWC is not consistent but it eventually does cut the connection off). If ExpressVPN works for you, great, I just have seen them and others who aren't registered with the Chinese government being cut off randomly. this is usually from their corporate office or data center).ĭepending on your use case, another possibility is using something like teamviewer/anydesk/vnc (make sure you use MFA for security purposes) to an endpoint outside of China (I've done this).
One option that some people have successfully used is hosting their own VPNs (eg, using a cloud provider or through their own internet connection and a virtual machine. It happens to me no matter which protocol and server I use. I can disconnect and reconnect, but it's annoying having to do that every few hours. I'm also experiencing connection problems where I lose internet access even though Astrill says I'm connected. What are the differences and which one is the best to use?Īnyways, I can't recommend Astrill VPN at all. So what's the problem with Astrill and how can I configure it to behave more like ExpressVPN? My connection would pause if I get disconnected. It's important that my connection is secured at all times. This is a concern as this happened when I was at a Marriott hotel. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to pause my connection for security reason unlike ExpressVPN. For reasons that I don't understand, my phone's connection to Astrill would break.
So far I have only tested Astrill on two Android devices: Samsung Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel 2 XL. If things don't improve by the end of this month, I'm leaving Astrill and may just sign up when I need to use it in China. I only paid for a one month subscription. It's probably user error in my part so I thought I would create this thread. So far, my experience have been a bit frustrating. My ExpressVPN subscription ended a few days ago and I thought I would give Astrill a try based on the recommendation of a fellow FTer.