Interesting - thanks for the insight mate!
Am I? Fair enough. I think mostly it’s just they’ve always been pretty good to me. Living here long enough makes you appreciate good customer service a little more. I’m not exactly happy about this latest downtime, but what good does complaining about it here do? Astrill has been pretty shitty the last couple of months, guess I’m just trying to stay optimistic that they’ll fix it, since I paid for like a year of the Family Plan and StealthVPN.
For what it’s worth, I’m no longer giving out Astrill invites, since after the last couple of months I no longer believe in the quality of their service enough to recommend it to others. I don’t feel right promoting something that does not work as advertised.
I think people tend to jump on bandwagons rather quickly, suspecting there’s something foul or malevolent afoot when it’s more likely incompetence or a genuine mistake. I’m not talking specifically about Astrill, just in general.
I also defend Shanghai’s air quality when the smog gets overexaggerated by the infinite armchair analysts on Reddit, doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Just means it’s probably not as bad as a lot of people try to make out 
I used to be a really cynical bastard, I’m English, it’s in my blood. Nowadays I make more of a conscious effort to be a little more optimistic about stuff.
Gotcha, thanks.
All customary snark aside, appreciate your input in this thread. Thank you.
I’ve heard only bad things about Astrill on DD-WRT routers so have avoided that side of the product entirely. To be honest I don’t want to be reflashing the router firmware every time China ups their VPN blocking game so I’d rather have a software based solution, as convenient as a router with VPN cooked in would be here.
I tried ExpressVPN and StrongVPN before switching to Astrill. Those two didn’t come close to Astrill at the time, but that was a long time ago and I’m sure they’ve both come a long way.
you know, this makes me wonder what I’m gonna do if my home country ever asks me to prove I earned my funds in china legally. crap, I hope the chinese forms I got (that I cannot read) will cover me.
Can you do me a favour and report back after a couple of days with your findings? We should get a list going.
Edit: let’s do this shit
I posted because I wanted to know whether it’s a unique case or something that has to do with the update.
Which Astrill would have told you far quicker and more accurately than anyone here. It’s their product. I honestly thought you were trolling me, reading a thread that asks not to ask questions and then immediately asking a question…
No matter, enjoy your interwebs
I gave the DD-WRT a shot as i’ve got a Netflix enabled bluray player. It works well when it works. i would guess about 80% of the time. and getting it to work when it’s being finicky is a simple matter of unplugging the router and plugging it back in. I think the big issue is how finicky the internet is here in general. most times when the VPN router goes down so does the non-vpn router. The non-vpn router just doesn’t need a kick in the pants to reconnect to the outside world. I imagine this has something to do with the way that the fiber optics guy installed our fiber line. It’s just pushed through the wall into the outside world and then haphazardly strung up on various other wires to the junction box near the entrance to our little slice of china. It’s almost as if there’s a dude holding the fiber line connection in with his hands at the other end but he get’s bored and takes a smoke break every couple of hours making the connection hit or miss
All in all the DD-WRT Astrill experience is a positive one for us. it’s nice to have all of our devices at home (phones tablets etc) be able to skip over the GFW. also kinda cool when we have guests from other countries visit i don’t need to help them setup a VPN. i just need to teach them how to reset the VPN router!
Sure, but only if agree to start spelling “favour” the correct, American way.
Look I’m sorry I bombed your thread, wasn’t my intention at all. Now if it makes you feel better, delete my message, let’s virtually shake hands and get on with our Sunday mornings.
Yeah, I’m not really into subtlety. If anything, I didn’t try hard enough. Sorry to disappoint, I know expectations are high!
I do agree that it’s a little suspect, they should definitely have given some kind of notification beforehand. The whole site being down without a redirect isn’t that unusual (if it is indeed maintenance), so long as it comes back fairly quickly. I don’t feel the need to jump straight on the conspiracy bandwagon, but we’ll see. If people have such immediate distrust in them the second their service goes down, I don’t know why they don’t just consider using a different VPN.
You can probably write a script for the DD-WRT router that periodically pings Google’s servers, and if it doesn’t get a response it automatically reboots the router.
But yeah, I agree with absolutely everything you say about Chinese internet being finickity. Every night around 9pm the upload pipe on my apartment’s internet slows to a fucking crawl for about 30 minutes to an hour. I don’t know if it’s all the Chinese people coming back home and tuning into their Korean soaps or what, but it seems to happen every night at around the same time every time. Sadly, the upload being clogged generally means my download speeds go through the floor too. I stream on Twitch sometimes and it’s annoying suddenly seeing all the dropped frames arrive around 9pm like clockwork.
No deal. The colour of my armour shows the flavour of my honour.
Pas de probleme, mon ami
I don’t know why they don’t just consider using a different VPN.
actually changed yesterday, coincidence. long-time dissatisfied, finally sat down and took the time to find something else.
As an American whose home university is in Scotland…I like that.
Merci
For general info, I dealt with Astrill to resolve the problem, it took 2 reps and 30 minutes for them to understand the problem and give me a solution…So yeah…Astrill customer service…
Hah. Fair enough.
If you only jumped ship a few months ago then I can understand why you’d be a little peeved - Astrill hasn’t been particularly awesome recently. But I’ve had pretty much 3 years of very reliable performance and service from them, I guess they’ve earned a little more faith from me.
What did you switch to and how are you finding it so far? Astrill has been pretty weak lately and they’re not sorting it out as quickly as they have done in the past. If it continues this way for much longer I’m probably going to make the jump too.
I don’t so much mind a little downtime, so long as it works when it comes back. Sadly, Astrill may have become a victim of its own popularity and the servers can’t take it any more. Either that or China has really stepped up its VPN blocking game and Astrill can’t keep up.
I am currently trying out bolehvpn. was considering pro xpn but got a bad feeling about them once or twice, so I put them back in line to try in case boleh doesn’t work. I don’t feel like I can truly evaluate given this short amount of time but can report back in a week.
with astrill it’s always someone else. oh, the chinese firewall is slowing you down. anywhere else is fine. really? I travel to shanghai, hongkong, japan and have the same lame speeds. the chinese firewall prevents me from connecting or it doesn’t but after that it’s all astrill. when they kept giving me excuses about the internal bandwidth of all of those countries and kept telling me the following update would make all my complaints mute time and again and nothing ever got better, I was pissed. and then last month I realized that even in germany, which really does have bandwidth, connection speeds to astrill suck.
I can forgive problems. shit happens. I cannot forgive outright lies, especially from a company I need to be able to trust.