Leaderboard

I've used Azire, via wireguard, in my router for over two years. I started with them when they and Mullvad were the only wireguard providers I could identify, and they seemed the simpler to use. I continue to use Azire because of their consistently solid speeds and especially their absolute reliability. I use two Azire servers daily, one fixed and one rotating, with near-constant light bandwidth, and only once in those 2+ years did I ever find my chosen server offline. It was back within an hour IIRC. And while I consider Air my primary VPN, I like having a backup VPN as well. Helps sometimes with blocked sites, for example. Azire has very few servers. For example there are three in the US, two in Germany, two in Spain, and there is one in Switzerland, but they clearly take having each of them up and working well very seriously, so having so few does not really concern me. I use European and US servers, and generally they are only lightly loaded. Their Stockholm location seems the only one that is heavily used per their server-status page, which is better than nothing though nowhere near as informative as Air's. Their servers are diskless without CDROM drives, and with sealed USB, VGA, and serial ports. They are not rented but are their own, configured and tested by Azire in Sweden and then installed at the remote data centers by Azire's own people. I don't remember details of their privacy policy, but I remember I was very positively impressed. There are downsides. Their support, via email, seems a bit slow to me and not always really helpful, though my experience is limited. There is no online community on their site, but I have not looked into reddit, etc. Their are no domain names that map to the IP of the best server in a region like Air has. I'm not aware of Azire deleting the wireguard server's last-used client IP after a timeout the way Air does. And their wireguard configs do not use the extra pre-shared key like Air's do. I don't consider that a real issue, as the standard wireguard key is plenty long enough for security for now. For me though the one really difficult Azire downside is an undocumented "feature": For security, your wireguard peer setup (your public key and other details) at their server evaporates after some unknown (and they won't tell... I asked) number of weeks without use at that individual server. So you have to reconfigure for that server. Experience says this timeout interval is probably more than 4 weeks but less than 12. This makes it hard to use Azire as a rarely used backup VPN. I've had to develop an occasional routine of briefly connecting to each configured Azire wireguard server from each of my configured client devices, just as a sort of "keep alive" action. Azire's primary protocol is actually OpenVPN, but I have not tried it. Air is my OpenVPN provider. And the Azire wireguard keep-alive "feature" has me gradually moving my less-used wireguard clients over to Air as well. I still favor Azire for my router's hardwired wireguard clients though, for Azire's absolute reliability. Occasionally I find I cannot establish a wireguard connection with an Air server. Doesn't happen with Azire.