Astrill VPN Client

Most of the time, it works. But living in China, when it won’t connect, there is no help. The online help is blocked in China, needing a VPN that won’t work to get help. It normally works for about 2 months, then struggles for a few weeks, then repeats the process. If I wasn’t dropping $130 a year, I wouldn’t be so critical. But they need to either advertise they should not be used in China or fix it so I can. Update: their service continues to drop in quality. I am changing my rating from 2 to 1 star. I would gladly raise it if they could fix their issues. I will be quitting their service when my contract ends and going with a more reliable VPN. Update part 2: I was finally able to get a hold of tech support. They have a website for China. Unfortunately, the only way to find the website is to go on the website that is currently blocked in China. Despite this, tech-support was able to help and I am now getting slightly more consistent usage. I will be changing my star rating from one to three.

I have been using Astrill last 7-8 years and till year ago it was the best option on the market but recently were experiencing a lot of issues, servers are not working, drops, slow Speed etc. I do understand challenges on Chinese market but I hope the team will fix the issues soon, as people are moving to cheap alternatives, and I might be forced to as well.

This is the only western VPN that works reliably in China. It is expensive but worth it for that use-case. However it’s only reliable insofar as you find a working location. There are some times when a given vpn location works stellar for months and others where you spend all night trying to find a working one. I’m sure there is a reason for having what seems likes hundreds of available locations that mostly don’t work, but as a layman it feels like 10 curated working locations would be better than hundreds of useless ones with a few mystery working ones that you have to find. And count on the recommended/super charged “for China” ones never working. And I don’t mean sometimes. Those ones have literally never worked. It’s always an obscure one like Kalamazoo 3 or something. Also the UI is unforgivably bad for the price, and the lack of IOS support for stealth vpn is the same.