For more than 15 years now, torrenting has been the quickest and the most popular method of P2P file sharing. Most of the internet users have done it at least once, and many are using it actively.
About Torrenting:
Torrenting is the process of sharing files online via BitTorrent clients, and it has become very popular because of the speed and simplicity of the process itself. It doesn’t require storing data on centralized servers, but instead, you can send and receive large files over the internet directly.
How to Torrent?
The process itself is, as we mentioned, pretty simple. What you need to do in order to successfully torrent is:
- Download and install a BitTorrent client
- Start your VPN and make sure it’s connected to a server within a region that allows torrenting
- Go to a BitTorrent website, and search for the content that you wish to download
- Upon finding the desired content, click on ‘download via torrent’ button, or on the small magnet icon
- At this point, your BitTorrent client should open and offer you a choice of the download location. Set up the location and click OK
- That’s it, you’re now successfully downloading content via torrent
Is it Dangerous to Torrent?
This is one of the most frequently asked questions, and the answer is – yes and no. There are different things that should be considered, for example, what’s your countries view and law about this. Some countries don’t allow torrenting, and they can go as far as blocking it.
And if they do, there are all sorts of other dangers that you might face while torrenting, like running into malware on torrent websites, or having your IP openly shown and vulnerable. This is one of the most dangerous things about torrenting, the fact that you’re giving away a lot of data about yourself. A capable hacker can use your IP address to discover your location, ISP provider, and even your torrenting history. There are even websites where you can see this for yourself, by simply typing in your IP.
Of course, there are ways of protecting yourself and preventing the mentioned dangers, and the best method of doing so is the use of a VPN. Many of the VPNs can be used to successfully protect you while torrenting, but this time, we’re only going to talk about one VPN provider, and that’s TunnelBear.
TunnelBear
When you first visit the TunnelBear’s website, the first thought that will probably cross your mind is that they chose the name right. The website is covered in bears, and that includes aesthetic design, wording, and even the performance as well.
The VPN’s app is quite simple, it only has an On/Off switch, and a list of servers from which you can choose from. Apart from that, there’s also a network kill switch, but nothing more, and the same goes for the smartphone app as well.
It has a decent encryption, as well as browser extensions that serve as proxies, and it doesn’t log your online activity.
When it comes to servers, they can be found in 20 of the world countries, which isn’t as good, because this means that they’re either too close to be useful or too far away to be fast. This is mostly the reason why its speed isn’t as impressive, but it’s useful enough for casual users.
When it comes to its prices, it has one free package and two that you must pay to use. However, the free package is extremely limited, since only provides you with 500mb of free data. The prices for the other two aren’t big either, but the most important fact against TunnelBear is the fact that it doesn’t support torrenting. If you’re a torrent user and you wish to enhance your security, safety, and anonymity, TunnelBear won’t be of any use to you.
Is there an Alternative to Tunnelbear?
An alternative exists, fortunately, and that is to simply use another VPN, one of those that do support torrenting. There are many different providers out there that can help with this, and when it comes to choosing which one to use, it’s probably the best to try out several of them and then decide for yourself.
For starters, we can recommend four of them which were recommended to us by the more experienced users, and those are TorGuard, IPVanish, PIA, and GhostVPN. Every one of those can be used with torrents and will provide you with strong encryption, safety against malware and the prying eyes, as well as an amazing number of servers to choose from. They’re all very fast and very secure, and we’re sure that one of them will suit your purposes perfectly.
VPNs are useful outside torrenting as well, and you should have that in mind when you’re choosing the one you’ll use. The four we mentioned earlier aren’t just for torrenting, but they do their job perfectly and they will protect you. Make no mistake, the dangers of the internet are real, and the protection is necessary these days.
