Entering the world of torrenting should be done cautiously. After all, we’ve all heard stories about police arrests, DDoS attacks, DMCA subpoenas, and ISP blocks – to give you just a few examples. Many of those problems plague torrent platforms directly, but many of those also expand to regular P2P users. With that said, it’s time to think about how to download torrents with a VPN (properly and securely).
In this short guide, we'll lay out the four steps to securing your Internet connection, making it encrypted, and anonymously downloading torrents. Each of those steps is equally important, so make sure to read this article very carefully.
Step #1: Configure Your VPN Service
Before you download torrents with a VPN turned on, you need to tweak your VPN client (to ensure you have a leak-free VPN environment).
First of all, inspect the VPN protocols your VPN app offers (this is typically found by going to your VPN client's settings). If it's set to automatic or something similar, we highly recommend switching that to OpenVPN, which comes as the best protocol for torrenting (as you get both speed and high-end data protection).
Then, it’s absolutely essential to use a VPN that has a kill switch. Once you enable a kill switch, your VPN shut down your Web connectivity if your secure connection becomes compromised (for any reason). Just like switching to a different protocol, you can enable your VPN's kill switch by visiting its settings.
Step #2: Configure Your Torrent Client
When configuring your torrent client, there are a couple of things to enable and disable via your torrent client's settings to ensure that everything works smoothly.
If your torrent client supports enabling UPnP port mapping, you should definitely use that option. The same applies to NAT-PMP port mapping. And aside from that, ensure to "whitelist" your torrent client if you use any firewall-related software (or if you use Windows).
We won't get into details on how the above said is done, as we offer you our dedicated guide on how to configure uTorrent. And also, you’ll want to read our tips on how to make uTorrent faster.
Step #3: Connect to a Secure P2P VPN Server
Finally, it’s time for the last step before you get to download torrents with a VPN. And, you guessed it – we’re talking about connecting to a P2P VPN server.
To connect to a server, you need to launch your VPN app. You can reveal all of the servers offered by your VPN typically via its home screen, where you’ll see the available servers organized by their location. Make sure to know which server you should use, as P2P servers are typically marked with a special symbol (unless all of your VPN’s servers are optimized for P2P).Â
Once you connect to a VPN server, there should be a notification saying that your VPN session is now active. Therefore, your data should now travel through a secure tunnel.
Step #4: Find a Torrent File & Start Downloading It
You've set everything up correctly, which means that you can now start to download torrents without any fear of your P2P-related data leaking on the Web.
In case you need any recommendations, here are the best torrent sites overall (and even more importantly, here are the best torrent search engines). Using the provided links, you'll find dozens of recommendations, letting you reach millions of files across many P2P networks.
So, that would be all on how to download torrents with a VPN. If you have any doubts or questions, share them with us via the comments section below. And finally, thanks for reading!