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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Wifimask looks promising, esp with ad-blocking built-in. A few questions:

Where do you purchase your servers from?

How trustworthy are the underlying VPS providers across different countries that you've got presence in?

It was recently pointed out that PIA was $30 million in debt... Looks like VPN is a brutal business, but your pricing is (low?) at $4 for unlimited devices and you're bootstrapped. How do you manage to pull it off?

What are the upcoming features that you plan? Consequently, what are the most requested features?

Thanks.

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All servers are purchased from Digital Ocean only at the moment. I think it is very important to buy servers from a thrustworthy party especially in the VPN business, even if that means we pay a little bit extra.

VPN is a brutal business. But because we are bootstrapped and thus no screaming investors/banks behind our backs and we are a small team, costs are low and there's no one who can pull the plug but ourselves. I don't know how many people are working for PIA, but in my opinion you don't need ten's or hundred's of people to build and run a VPN company. I'm not very surprised they are supposedly in that much debt.

The most requested feature is an Android app. ;-) And unblocking Netflix ofcourse, but they seem to get even better at blocking VPN's than the Great Firewall of China. What would your feature request be? :-)

> All servers are purchased from Digital Ocean only at the moment.

Are there any legal or technical reasons to prefer DigitalOcean over OVH and Hetzner? They seem to be both, much more cost-efficient, and much more privacy-oriented.

> What would your feature request be?

WireGuard.

I have tested both OVH and Hetzner, Digital Ocean's speed is much faster and stable worldwide.

I'm definitely keeping an eye on WireGuard, it is very promising.

How are you going to manage bandwidth costs?

DigitalOcean are capped + 1cent/gb but your offering unlimited.... a few heavy streamers or torrents could ruin your monthly bill?

We are very flexible, if DO isn't the best choice anymore for our demands, we will look around for other options.

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