About VPN Shelf

In late 2023, my employer sent out a breach notification. Third-party vendor, names and emails exposed, the standard apology paragraph. Nothing catastrophic, but it was enough to make me stop treating network privacy as a checkbox.

I already had a VPN subscription I barely used. Turned it on once, got annoyed by the speed drop, turned it off. So I started over and this time paid attention: same servers, same time of day, two weeks of daily speed tests. I read through privacy policies more carefully than is reasonable. I cancelled one subscription because the "no-logs" wording, on close reading, probably didn't mean what I thought it meant. Signed up for three more. Kept a spreadsheet of results that outlived any reasonable research project.

VPN Shelf is where that research lives. Real speed numbers from Seattle. Billing surprises, renewal gotchas, support experience. What each provider gets right, and what it quietly gets wrong once you've been a customer for six months.

Two years and over a dozen paid subscriptions in, testing still runs on a recurring basis. Providers update infrastructure, change pricing, and revise privacy policies without announcements. A review accurate in January can go quietly stale by summer. The goal here is a record that holds up.

More on how testing works on the author page.

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