I switched to windscribe last month because the proton CEO starting spewing politcal BS, and I wanted port forwarding that wasn't locked behind a shitty GUI.
As far as I was concerned setup was super easy, the VPN speeds were great, and port forwarding worked really nicely. The whole price for a fixed server and port forward, + unlimited data was a bit much (at $95/year) but for the ease of use and speeds I was getting, I was happy to stick with them.
My setup is a always-on server with a 1gbps connection, where yes, I fucking seed my shit, all of it. I have about 30TB of linux ISOs and counting, and it's rare that my combined upload speed is less than 1MBps, ever.
Which lead me to getting banned from windscribe with no notice or warning in the middle of last week. This lead to me having to spend tracker points to avoid HnR, and i'm also unable to grab any new ISOs until I find a new VPN provider that won't ban me for actually using the service full time.
I did shoot them an email (after talking' with their AI bot first), and they were actually helpful enough. The offered to restore support, so long as I promised to not torrent with them again (which, I honestly did promise not to. I'm not sticking with a VPN service that can't handle me actually using it for what it's advertised for) and they did unban the account. Whole email chain took about three days to get resolved.
My sticking point is that they still have instructions on setting up torrents on their own website, and that they specifically allow for unlimited data (with the plan i paid for) so long as it's just one user. I did not break those rules. After clarifying that in the support email, they still said that I was using too much data (despite the unlimited data advertisement) and that torrenting was not allowed on their service.
TL:DR: Windscribe bans you if you use a lot of data, and support says torrents aren't allowed, despite their website advertising such. Proof in the attached images.
If y'all have any other suggestions for a VPN that allow port forwarding i'd really appreciate it.
I'll let you in on some reality about sysadmins: we generally don't care what you're doing until it causes problems. Clearly this guy's amount of traffic did.
So yeah, absolutely. This is normal and reasonable.
It has to be against the rules for situations exactly like this where OP should be using a seedbox. But generally, they have better things to do than track down every little minor rule abuse.
Like playing their own pirated games while wfh. Or fixing other problems. Most teams of people who support shit like this are understaffed.
For instance, I'm sure that people are using my work network for all sorts of shit. I've seen people streaming Netflix to their desks. We lock down what we can, and don't worry about shit until we have to because it's causing a problem. Like years ago when someone streamed Netflix at an old location with I think only a T1 connection, saturated the network connection, and then no one could access anything on the network.
Most people don't go around looking for reasons to enforce the rules. They use them when they have to because there's a problem.
We don't even care about customers going way over their license until they give us a reason to. You pay for 500 users, you have 2000 and are using the platform as a barely compressed 4k video hosting service which it really isn't designed for. Then you also complain about performance?
Homestly if they didn't act so shitty when raising a support ticket over it we probably would have continued to not care about it. Being a dick about it though and we will look for any reason to tell you to fuck off.