By Williamo in AzireVPN —

Purple Post 15 - January

Upcoming changes to plans

We will introduce later this year a change in the currently proposed plans, which will be split into two kinds of plans.

Regular and premium plans

Some of our users do not need or do not want to use public IP addresses, because they do not feel the need of having opened incoming ports, or because they wish to stay lost in the crowd while still being able to use services which could identify them, like social medias, while sharing an IP address used by some other users as well.

Also, as you may know, IPv4 addresses on the Internet become more scarce as time passes by so we have to take into consideration this factor, plus the continuous increase in price of these addresses which is not really sustainable at this point for such a fair priced VPN service like AzireVPN.

Moreover, the decision to support the new, state-of-the-art VPN protocol, WireGuard, will requires us more IPv4 addresses to sustain the asking of our users in static IPv4 addresses, in addition to the existing pool of OpenVPN public IPv4 addresses that we already manage.

We therefore took the not so easy decision to split the actual plans into two distinct plans: regular and premium.

Technical differences

Eventually, some changes and differences are to be expected, but they will affect every VPN protocol that we offer slightly differently.

First of all, for both OpenVPN and WireGuard protocols, we will introduce a new feature which can be referred to as full NAT. This feature will propose both shared (NAT) IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on both VPN tunnels, to achieve a better anonymity of our users. It will, by itself, mainly become the essence of the regular plan, which will stay at the current plan prices.

On the other hand, the premium plan will give access to public and static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for those who need opened incoming ports:

  • OpenVPN: Public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, like the actual public IP addresses configuration
  • WireGuard: Static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, including a /64 IPv6 range for routers, like the actual IPv6 configuration

Differences between public and static IP addresses

You might ask yourself what is the difference between a shared, public and static IP address as we refer to them at AzireVPN.

Here is a quick explanation of all the types of IP addresses we are proposing on our service:

  • Shared (OpenVPN and WireGuard): shared between a handful of users, with all incoming ports blocked due to the use of NAT
  • Public (OpenVPN): assigned at connection from a pool of IP addresses, used by only one user at a time, with all incoming ports opened, during the whole time of the connection, and which might change upon re-connection
  • Static (WireGuard): like public, a unique address indefinitely assigned to a user until the IP address is lost for some reasons like it is not used anymore or the user did not add time on their account

Conclusion

The costs implied by the allocation of public and static IP addresses has to be reflected in some way for AzireVPN to stay a reasonably priced VPN service, evolving with its constantly growing user base. Right from the beginning, we wanted to offer our service at a fair price and so, we are doing everything to limit the increase involved by this new premium plan, at a not yet definitive price of 2 € per month, added to the regular price plans.

We expect to apply these changes from the start of the second quarter of this year.

New location in Oslo, Norway

In our quest of more locations, we got the opportunity to take a moment at Oslo, in Norway. Norway is not a member of the European Union which makes it a very interesting location for our European users extremely concerned about their privacy while keeping good latencies and network throughput.

Because you do not change a winning team, we will use the upstream services of the Internet Service Provider Obenetwork AB for the connectivity of the servers, which is also the ISP for the Sweden and United Kingdom locations.

A promising new year

Of course, we could not end this blog post without wishing to all our users a happy and healthy new year 2019 for them and their relatives.

It will be another exciting year for AzireVPN, with a lot of expected evolution and improvements. Thank you for making our service a more successful one, which we are always trying to improve in good ways while keeping what made our reputation so far: quality over quantity, security of our users and a strong privacy policy.

Warrant Canary

Our warrant canary has been updated and can be found here.