Bt Proxy
BitTorrent Proxy Support – BTGuard
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I test if BTGuard is working?
Please follow these steps to confirm BTGuard is setup correctly.
1. Visit 2. Follow the instructions to check your BitTorrent IP stead of yours, you should get or or or or
BTGuard is not working (Easy Install)
If the easy install fails to complete successfully, please use the Advanced Install.
Otherwise, please follow these troubleshooting steps. We do not offer support for personal computer problems.
1. Ensure your “Account Status” is “Active” at
Start Menu -> BTGuard -> BTGuard Settings
2. Make sure you are testing with our test torrent.
3. Try the Advanced Install.
BTGuard is not working (Advanced Install)
Please follow these troubleshooting steps. Ensure your “Account Status” is “Active” at 2. Try a different BitTorrent client.
4. Try the Easy Install.
uTorrent Error ‘Proxy connect error: hostname not found’
You must change your DNS settings to use Google. Please follow the instructions to change them.
Virutal machine overstack over flow error?
You must run the BTGuard Install as administrator. Right click on the BTGuard install, and click “Run as administrator”.
Why won’t uTorrent work on my Mac with BTGuard?
uTorrent for the Mac currently does not offer proxy functions. You must use Vuze for the Mac.
Why doesn’t the easy install work for Mac?
The easy install is for Windows only. You must use the advanced Vuse install for the Mac.
My connection is limited to web browsing (port 80)
The default port for the BTGuard proxy is 1025, however you can change it to port 80 if your connection is limited.
How to Completely Anonymize Your BitTorrent Traffic with a …
BitTorrent isn’t the quiet haven it once was. These days, everyone’s looking to throttle your connection, spy on what you’re downloading, or even send you an ominous letter. If you use BitTorrent, you absolutely need to take precautions to hide your identity. Here’s how to do that with a simple post originally detailed the setup of a proxy called BTGuard. Since its original publication in 2011, we’ve changed our recommendation to Private Internet Access due to BTGuard’s slow speeds, bad customer service, and other difficulties. If you’re still interested in using BTGuard, you can find instructions on their web have a few different options when it comes to hiding your BitTorrent activity, but we’ve found that a proxy is the most convenient and easiest to set up, so that’s what we’re going to cover here. We’ve talked about proxies a few times before, most notably with our original guide on how to set up BTGuard our guide to safe torrenting post-Demonoid. Unfortunately, BTGuard has never been a great service—it was just the most convenient. Thankfully, Private Internet Access—one of our favorite VPN providers—now provides a proxy very similar to BTGuard, but with faster speeds and better customer service. So we recommend using it instead, using the instructions below. If you don’t want to use a proxy, check out the end of the article for a few alternative a BitTorrent Proxy WorksG/O Media may get a commissionWhen you download or seed a torrent, you’re connecting to a bunch of other people, called a swarm. All of those people can see your computer’s IP address—they have to in order to connect. That’s all very handy when you’re sharing files with other netizens, but file sharers such as yourself aren’t necessarily the only people paying attention. Piracy monitoring groups (often paid for by the entertainment industry either before or after they find violators) also join BitTorrent swarms, but instead of sharing files, they’re logging the IP addresses of other people in the swarm—including you—so that they can notify your ISP of your doings. A proxy (like Private Internet Access) funnels traffic—in this case, just your BitTorrent traffic—through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from them instead of you. In this case, Private Internet Access’ proxy server is in the Netherlands. That way, those anti-piracy groups can’t contact your ISP, and your ISP has no cause to send you a harrowing wait, can’t the piracy groups then go to the anonymizer service and requisition their logs to figure out what you’re downloading? Theoretically, yes, but if you’re using a truly good anonymizer, they don’t keep logs, so there’s no paper trail of activity leading back to you. All the piracy monitors see is a proxy service sharing a file, and all your ISP sees is you connecting to a proxy service. If you encrypt your BitTorrent traffic (which we recommend), your ISP won’t even be able to see that you’re using too good to be true, right? Well, there are a few downsides. Most notably:Anonymity isn’t free. Well, at least the ones worth using aren’t. Private Internet Access costs $6. 95 a month or $39. 95 a year. That isn’t very expensive, though, and it’s well worth it for the privacy you ’ll get slower download speeds. Running your connection through another server inevitably slows you down, though how much depends on what torrent you’re downloading, who from, and a lot of other factors. In my experience, more popular torrents stayed at their top speed of 3. 4 MB/s (my bandwidth cap) with a proxy, while other less popular torrents slowed down from 1 MB/s to about 500-600 kB/s. Your mileage may vary. I lost significantly less speed with Private Internet Access than I did with BTGuard, every BitTorrent client supports proxies. uTorrent for Windows works great, but Mac and Linux favorite Transmission sadly does not support proxies. You’ll have to use something like Deluge instead (or try one of the alternatives listed at the end of this article). Nothing is foolproof. Using a proxy may bring you increased anonymity, but nothing is guaranteed unless you avoid BitTorrent entirely. Ready to get started? Here’s what you need to to Set Up the Private Internet Access ProxySetting up a proxy is actually very simple, and just involves signing up for a service and checking a few boxes in your BitTorrent client. We’ll be using Private Internet Access and uTorrent for Windows for this guide, but you can tweak things to fit your own setup pretty One: Sign Up for Private Internet Access Private Internet Access is primarily a VPN provider. We’ll talk a bit more about VPNs later in this post, but what we really want is the SOCKS5 proxy that comes with their VPN service. So, head to Private Internet Access’ web site and sign up for their VPN service. We recommend starting out with a monthly plan to see if you like it before buying a whole year’s you’ve signed up, Private Internet Access will email you your username and password. Log into the system with those credentials, and change your password from the client control Two: Generate a Proxy PasswordYour account credentials are only to manage your account—we’ll need a new set of credentials for the Proxy service. In the client control panel, click the “Generate Password” button under “PPTP/L2TP/SOCKS Password. ” This is what we’ll be using to configure our BitTorrent client. Write down the username and password that appears here (it’s different than your regular account credentials) and move on to step Three: Configure Your BitTorrent ClientNext, open up uTorrent and head to Options > Preferences > Connection. Under Proxy Server, choose Socks5 under “Type” and enter the following information:Proxy Type: Socks5Proxy Host: mProxy Port: 1080Username: Your Private Internet Access Proxy username (from step two)Password: Your Private Internet Access Proxy password (from step two)Check all of the other boxes under “Proxy” and “Proxy Privacy. ” Your Connection preferences should look exactly like the image Four: See If It’s WorkingTo ensure that it’s working, head over to Torguard’s IP Checker. This site can tell you what your IP address is, and compare it to the IP address of your torrent client, which will let you know whether your proxy is working correctly. To test it, hit the “Generate Torrent” button, and open the resulting torrent in uTorrent. Then, go back to your browser and hit the Refresh button under the “Check IP” tab. If it’s the same as your browser IP—which you’ll see next to the Refresh button—then your proxy isn’t working, and you’ll want to double-check all of the above settings. If it shows a different IP address (which should be in the Netherlands), then Private Internet Access is successfully tunneling all your traffic for Ways to Anonymize Your BitTorrent TrafficA proxy like Private Internet Access is the most convenient way to anonymize your traffic, but it isn’t the only way. If you want to try something else, here are a few other tricks we a VPNA virtual private network (or VPN) is very similar to a proxy, but instead of rerouting just your BitTorrent traffic, it reroutes all your internet traffic. For some people, that’s a good thing—it gives you privacy all over the web. However, it can also be inconvenient, navigating you to different web pages for that VPN’s country or causing issues with streaming services. If you have a NAS, you can set up your VPN on it to route only your NAS traffic, which is a perfect option for downloading anonymously. VPNs are about the same price as most proxies, and I personally have found that I get better speeds with most VPNs than I do with a which VPN should you use? Check out TorrentFreak’s list of the best VPNs for BitTorrent, as well as our Hive Five on the subject to find a provider that works for a SeedboxUnlike proxies and VPNs, seedboxes don’t route your BitTorrent traffic through another country. Instead, you actually rent a dedicated server that resides in that country, and do all your torrenting through that machine. They usually have insanely fast speeds, and if you’re on a private tracker, they’ll seed 24/7, giving you a great ratio. Once you download a torrent on your seedbox, you can just connect to it via FTP and download the file as fast as your home connection allows. Note that seedboxes also require a bit of extra setup, and some may require a little command line work to get edboxes are more expensive than proxies and VPNs, ranging from entry-level boxes at $10 or $20 a month to fast boxes with more storage at $50 or even $100 a month. But, it offers a lot of advantages over proxies and VPNs—if you have the money to spare and want super fast speeds and a good ratio, we highly recommend getting a seedbox. Providers like Whatbox, Feral, and Bytesized come highly recommended, but a bit of searching can provide you with a ton of options. Shop around and see which one’s best for BitTorrent AltogetherYour last alternative is to try a new file sharing service entirely, like Usenet. It offers encrypted connections and doesn’t connect to peers, so others can’t track what you’re doing. It doesn’t always have the selection that BitTorrent has (depending on what you’re downloading), but it offers a ton of other advantages, most notably higher speeds and better privacy. Check out our guide to getting started with Usenet to see if it’s right for remixed from Simon and lynea (Shutterstock).
What’s the best Torrent Proxy Service? – Download Privacy
We compare Torguard, IPVanish, NordVPN & BTGuard SOCKS proxies head-to-head
VPN’s may still be the #1 torrent privacy tool (in popularity) but zero-log proxy services are the clear #2. Thanks to their low cost and one-time setup, SOCKS5 proxies are a more affordable privacy method than something like a Seedbox or Debrid service.
And to meet that demand, many of the top VPN services now offer logless SOCKS proxies either as a standalone service (Torguard, BTGuard), or even included free with any VPN subscription (PIA, NordVPN, IPVanish).
In this article you’ll learn:
The pros/cons of a proxy vs a VPNWhat type of proxy to use for torrenting (always SOCKS)Which zero-log proxies are the best performance/value
Proxy vs. VPN
A proxy and VPN both route traffic through a remote server (changing your IP address). But there are a few key differences:
A proxy typically doesn’t have it’s own encryption (VPN does)The proxy will usually be configured to route the network traffic of one specific program (your torrent client and/or web browser)You only need to configure the proxy once, inside your torrent client. There isn’t any standalone proxy software to run.
For a more in-depth look, READ: VPN vs. Proxy for torrenting.
Not all torrent clients fully support the proxying of peer data transfers. The best clients to use with a proxy are:
uTorrent/BitTorrentVuzeDelugeQBittorrentFlud (Android)tTorrent (Android)
Always use a SOCKS proxy. Never HTTP.
I’ve seen countless stories on Reddit and forums from people who thought they had anonymized their torrents by using a ‘free’ HTTP proxy they found on some website. You should NEVER use an HTTP or HTTPS web proxy for torrenting.
Why? Simple. The BitTorrent protocol doesn’t support HTTP for peer communications. Your torrent client will simply ignore the proxy for peer connections (allowing peers to see your real IP address).
The only proxy type that works is SOCKS. The modern version of the SOCKS proxy is SOCKSv5.
This is what you should use.
Learn More: SOCKS vs. HTTP proxies
Recommended SOCKS torrent proxy services:
These are my favorite torrent proxy services (ranked in order). I have personal experience using all of them, and they have been individually speed tested (your own performance may differ).
Ranking factors:
SpeedSecurityServer locationsWorks with magnet links? Included w/ VPN or sold separatelyPrice
1. Private Internet Access (from $3. 33/month)
Private Internet Access was the first major VPN to embrace file-sharing. They were also the first to bundle a logless SOCKS proxy with every VPN package. And they’re still our favorite torrent proxy.
Why we ranked Private Internet Access #1 overall:
Speeds are excellentSolid security. You generate unique proxy credentials in your account panel (different from your VPN username/password). Works flawlessly with magnet links (some proxies have problems loading torrents from magnet links). Included w/ VPN: Every PIA plan includes both VPN + Proxy service for one low price.
Every PIA plan includes SOCKS5 proxy access
And most importantly, Private Internet Access has a proven privacy track record. They’re the only VPN provider (as far as I know) who has successfully defended their zero-log claims in court against the FBI.
Read: Our 2020 Private Internet Access Review
2. NordVPN (from $3. 99/month)
NordVPN is one of our top-ranked VPNs for torrenting. They also have the most included SOCKS proxy locations of any major VPN service. There are more than 40 NordVPN proxy server locations, and 11 p2p-optimized SOCKS5 servers.
NordVPN bundles proxy service with every VPN plan. Deals start around $3. 99/month.
Our only real concern about using NordVPN’s proxy is that they reuse your VPN credentials for all their proxy servers. Most torrent clients transmit proxy credentials in cleartext (unencrypted) so if you’re using the proxy on a public network, an attacker could potentially steal your VPN credentials. I have no idea why they don’t use a unique proxy login like all other services.
Pros:
Many server locationsGood speedsGreat priceWorks perfectly with magnet linksGood support (NordVPN has setup guides for most torrent clients).
3. Torguard (from $4. 99/month)
Torguard is a great choice for torrent privacy because they fly below the radar. They’ve been around for nearly 10 years, but they don’t have the name recognition of Private Internet Access, NordVPN, or ExpressVPN. And they like that just fine.
Speeds at Torguard are excellent on both their Netherlands-based SOCKS proxy server and most VPN locations. They don’t overcrowd servers like some of their competitors.
Another unique advantage is Torguard built their own proxy setup tool which automatically installs the optimal proxy settings in your favorite torrent client (uTorrent, Vuze, Deluge supported).
The only negative I can find is that the proxy isn’t bundled with their base VPN package. You can buy a bundle, but it’ll cost closer to $10 a month if you want proxy and VPN service together. This is more than double the cost of some other services.
Torguard Pros:
Automatic proxy installerGreat speedsSeparate proxy credentials (good security)Under the radar
4. IPVanish (from $6. 49/month)
IPVanish is a stellar VPN service and one of our go-to VPNs for torrenting. Since 2015 they also bundle SOCKS5 proxy service with every subscription.
Speeds are solid on this Netherlands SOCKS5 cluster, and it works great with uTorrent, Vuze and QBittorrent in my testing.
The only caveat is that I’ve occasionally had issues with magnet links loading. Sometimes I’ve had to refresh the torrent a few times or even download the actual. torrent file to get the torrent to start.
Support has been responsive and has actually changed their server configuration to address this issues but I still experience problems from time to time.
Fast SOCKS5 speedsGood security (generate unique proxy credentials in your account panel)Included Free w/ VPN subscriptionTorrents are an allowed usage of proxy servers
Cons:
Occasional issues loading magnet links
5. BTGuard ($6. 95/month)
BTGuard is one of the oldest torrent proxy (and VPN) services in the world. They have been a zero-log provider from the beginning and make it a point to stay off the radar.
BTGuard’s proxy service offers encryption and is purpose-built for torrenting. But it’s expensive and support isn’t great.
BTGuard sells proxy and VPN service separately (the proxy is $6. 95/m for month-to-month plans).
One unique feature is that BTGuard has built their own encryption layer for the SOCKS proxy, which makes it more secure than the other services on this list.
And BTGuard is purpose-built for torrenting. A huge percentage of their subscribers do so for file-sharing privacy.
As far as downsides go, BTGuard is priced higher than competitors. You also need to be technically skilled enough to set everything up properly (we have guides). This is because BTGuard support is notoriously hard to reach and users often report just getting autoresponder messages or responses that have just been copied and pasted from their user-guides.
Good speedsBuilt specifically for torrentsEncryption layer for proxy (more secure)
non-existent supportexpensive for standalone proxy service
How to properly setup the proxy
You’ll need to do a one-time proxy setup inside your supported torrent software. You’ll configure the proxy settings and then it should connect automatically every time to open the torrent client.
The details (username/password/proxy address/port #) are different depending on which service you choose, but the setup process is identical.
We have proxy setup guides for:
uTorrent/BitTorrentVuzeDelugeQBittorrentAndroid (Flud & tTorrent)
Summary & Recommendations
There several reputable zero-log proxy services available for file-sharing. There are a couple things to be aware of when choosing:
You should ONLY use a SOCKS proxy for torrenting. Never HTTP(s)Several VPN services include a SOCKS proxy (PIA, IPVanish, NordVPN)You need to configure your torrent client to use the proxy (one-time)
Our favorite torrent-friendly proxy service is Private Internet Access, but any of the services on this list should serve you well.
Here are a couple reasons you might choose a different provider:
If you want the most server locations, choose NordVPNIf you want easy setup and the fastest speeds, get TorguardIf you want an encrypted SOCKS proxy, you need BTGuard.
More about encryption: There are 2 other ways to encrypt your torrent transfers. Checkout our complete torrent encryption guide.
Ryan is the editor and head reviewer. He’s been a tech geek and digital privacy enthusiast since the Y2k freakout in ’99.
When not writing BitTorrent tutorials, he can usually be found sipping a lager or playing pickup football (the real kind).
