Although I moved to Dubai, I keep regularly checking excellent HWZ forum. UAE has also internet censorship in place, similarly to Singapore or maybe even stronger, as probably more websites are blocked.
I had some time to search for Astrill backup and below are my findings. Astrill is an absolute number one in my opinion, they seem to be performing very well regardless of the country of residence (maybe except China...) I am on 100/20 connection... Here the internet is expensive, so I do miss VQ's 300/300.
PureVPN - or PureCrap as you prefer. On their native OS X app there is no OpenVPN... I managed to get free trial by sending them an email.
WiTopia - I was attracted by Stealth 4D & 5D protocols on their Personal PRO plan. Upon subscribing I found out that these 4D & 5D protocols are essentially using TCP, which is much slower than UDP. By using OpenVPN the only fast servers that I have noticed were Germany (Frankfurt) and Netherlands. The speed was however inconsistent which means I was getting between 25-50Mbps DOWN / 10Mbps UP. Their NL server is hosted in the same data center as Astrill - Leaseweb, so I had good benchmarking tool to compare
With Astrill I am getting 93/18. US servers were quite slow. Their technical guy was funny saying that even 20Mbit is plenty - I thought, tell it to the SG guys with 1Gbps connections
Beside it is not enough for Netflix 4k streaming for instance. Refund was processed after initial troubleshooting with their technical department. They have 15% off via some Reddit links if you Google it. $US70 1 year for Personal Pro, I paid US$59 after discount.
LE-VPN - HK based, they give you Viscosity software which you can install on one Mac and one Windows at the same time. You have to import all configs you are interested in. Definitely far from being convenient. They run typical protocols, over typical ports, 0 extra efforts by having in house app and solutions. I may buy myself VPS & Viscosity and be my own VPN provider. The speeds were so so and the NL server (also hosted on Leaseweb) performance was inconsistent. There is 30% discount code if you Google it. They gave me a refund same day with no questions asked. US$60 for 1 year, I paid US$40 after 30% discount.
PIA - Not sure where the hype is coming from. Their support was trying hard but all I was getting is max 20-25Mbps on majority of their servers. I tried different ports, servers, settings, sent debug logs to PIA support and in the end cancelled and got a refund. Perhaps their OS X app is super bad (certainly from visual aspect) and Viscosity would perform better (this is what I heard) but I didn't have a chance to compare. For me if they are doing their own in house software, it should be polished and optimized well. Took 1 month trial but it is probably the cheapest from the one I tested US40 per year. Neowin has it for US$60 - 2 years.
12VPN - Hidden gem it seems and probably the most serious competitor to Astrill. They focus on China which is why they have lots of optimizations in place, together with fast servers. Their OS X app is simple but great. It miss some bells and whistles of Astrill app, such as selective routing, customs DNS, router applet etc. It does support StealthVPN as standard (no need to pay extra), it has SmartDNS solution included which you can use alone or together with VPN. They also have OpenWeb which is similar or exactly the same Astrill's OpenWeb but it works better it seems, as some videos that are not working for me on Astrill's OpenWeb are working on 12VPN. They have some extra hidden servers which you can enable via website account. There are multiple settings you can tweak. You can use multiple devices on the same server provided each connection is using different protocol (e.g. OpenVPN desktop, IPSEC iOS) or if using the same protocol (OpenVPN) then different severs (e.g 2x Mac, one US LA, 2nd US NY). The servers are fast, however SpeedTest behave quite strange on this VPN for some reason, which is why I was also testing by using downloading files from
Leaseweb. I can download files with the speed of 10MB/s (80% of my connection) from UK, NL, US NY etc. using OpenVPN. Speeds on iOS were also very good (35Mbps). I contacted their support asking several questions and a comprehensive answer came few hours later from someone who seems to know what is doing. It's not cheap, US$99 for 1 year, more expensive than Astrill on paper but then on Astrill you have to pay extra for multiple devices & StealthVPN. They rarely have promos or coupon codes but they seem to have limited one week 30% offer by using GOLDENWEEK. I paid US$69 after discount which seems to be recurring. Also they have "refugee" policy, so in case if someone miss the discount code, you can write to them with a proof of having active VPN connection worth at least US$50 and they will give you 30% discount. US$69 seems to be a good deal for what they offer. They have 14 day money back guarantee, so it is worth to try. One thing: they do not allow torrenting on their servers but that's fine for me. I am in the trial period but it seems 12VPN will stay as the Astrill backup.
Previously I tried
VyprVPN but didn't have good impressions. I was really looking forward to their Chameleon protocol but the speeds were 20Mbps max to selected servers, as others were slower. iOS app speeds are also 6-7x slower than Astrill / 12VPN.
AirVPN seems to be very good too. Their native OS X app "Eddie" is definitely not a state of art productivity app but it seems to get better and better. Their speeds were quite good, they have good forum and support, some good solutions like geo-location servers. The only problem with geo-location on their servers is that if you connect to say NL, you have no choice to get US Netflix for example. Definitely something to try and consider, especially that if you send them an email they will give you 3-day trial code.