We are pleased to announce the addition of a new (and fast!) node located in Zurich, Switzerland (zurich.tunnelr.com).
The node is available for transfers as we speak.
We just did a quick speed test from a 20Mbit/2Mbit home connection in Florida and these are the results:
We’ve had a lot of requests for this location and we are happy to be able to finally offer it!
Enjoy and stay tuned for another big update coming in a couple of weeks.
We love Tunnelr and we love you.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve received countless suggestions from you guys on what we could improve, add or remove – and we’ve been listening 
Besides the usual bug reports and some design tweaks, we have now implemented two brand new and most requested features:
Credit Card processing & Dual tunneling accounts!
Yes! After a couple of months of fiddling with various payment processors, we have finally settled on Stripe.com and have fully implemented their sleek service. We now officially accept Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover, Diners Club and JCB. In addition to accepting regular CC payments, we also support subscriptions (which you can cancel at any time via our portal). You will be also happy to hear that we do not store any of your CC data on our servers (this is all handled by Stripe.com) and still have no additional requirements for filling out your billing information (name, address, etc.). Needless to say, we are extremely excited about this new addition and are glad to be able to offer an alternative payment method to PayPal.
Secondly – as promised, we have introduced Dual tunneling accounts. This account type will enable you to hold two simultaneous tunnel connections (SSH & VPN) on any two devices, using the same credentials! This type of an account would be best suited for those customers, who often have a need to create a quick SSH tunnel for a specific task (such as at work, on the road etc.), while being able to leave their existing, more permanent VPN tunnel up and running. This account type is available for $10.00/month, which we think is a pretty darn good deal.
Besides these two major feature updates, we have also expanded our US nodes (adding more Central and West coast nodes) and have implemented a much needed, proper helpdesk.
With that said, we hope that you enjoy these new features and are eager to hear any suggestions, thoughts or criticisms that you may have. As with any big release, there’s a chance that there may be some bugs, so if you encounter any issues, please submit a ticket to our helpdesk and we’ll be more than happy to assist.
Talk soon,
~Tunnelr Staff
P.S. For those interested, OpenBSD 5.0 has been released – it is a feature rich release and if you haven’t ordered it yet, go do it now and support the project!
A few weeks ago, we posted a reply on reddit to a user who was looking for a VPN provider to bypass his country’s censorship practices. We didn’t expect much – it was just an honest response to try and help out a fellow redditor. What we ended up receiving from the entire community though was something we could have never anticipated.
The number of questions and comments about our little project was out-of-this world. Reddit asked, and we answered. We received more signups and reviews than in all of our previous weeks combined. We started conversations with some really awesome people, and we loved listening to what they thought about Tunnelr.
So what changed? We found that a few users were having quirky DNS issues, which we optimized last night. The signup form and portal pages didn’t take too kindly to some complicated e-mails, so that was also addressed. We revamped our internal IP allocation methods, we added another UK node, and started searching for another US-West node (Fremont, CA – you’re next!).
All of our nodes handled the surge of traffic without a hitch, and we’re excited to see all of our new clients using the service to it’s full potential. We’ve had reports of users transferring up to 12mbit/s constant, and considering the additional hops+encryption, we feel like we’ve succeeded in creating something special that people actually use.
We’re really listening to all the feedback, and soon will begin rolling out another series of major changes to the service. Some changes are what we think we can improve on, and some are suggestions from our users. So with further adieu, here is what’s on the table at this time:
It’s been an exciting last couple of weeks for us, and we’re working hard to become the fastest, cheapest, most feature rich tunneling service on the Internet. We want to thank all of our users for their feedback, and we want to give a special thank you to all those reddit users who were so kind Thanks a lot guys!
Recently we stepped back and reviewed the last few months of this project, and evaluated things that we think we’ve done well, and focused on things that we think we could have done differently.
One big question we asked ourselves is: “Why do we NEED customer addresses?”. Originally we launched this service and required that all billing addresses be legitimate – this was supposed to help prevent fraud and as a result, keep costs low. Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet and some experience under our belts, our views on this have been dramatically changed.
You see, we only take PayPal payments, and until we begin processing credit card transactions, there is literally no need to store this data. Since PayPal handles all the fraud investigations internally, those address records are of no use to anyone.
In the end, we’re selling a service that is offers increased privacy. If we don’t need certain information about our clients, then there is no reason to store it. So with that being said, we’ve removed the address requirements for all (new and old) accounts.
If you are interested in changing (or deleting!) your address from our database, simply login to the client portal and update your billing address (we still need your name, though!). If you’d prefer that we do it, please drop us an e-mail and we’ll be glad to take care of that for you.
Our goal is 100% transparency, and it’s important to us that we let you know anytime we change something that may affect your view on our services. We look forward to providing you with reliable, cost-effective tunneling services for many years to come!
- Tunnelr.com
Over the past few weeks, we have been furiously working on implementing additional features that you have requested and now is the time to reveal them!
First things first, our most requested feature since starting Tunnelr has been custom usernames. We have now implemented this and all new sign ups will be able to choose their username during registration.
For those of you, who already have an account and wish to change their username – feel free to shoot us an email to support and we will get it done for you in a jiffy.
Next up – tutorials and lots of them! Since our launch, we’ve been seriously lacking a good tutorial section and this is something that we have been reminded of almost on a daily basis. With this update, we have created a new section on the site called “Tutorials“, that includes guides for both OpenSSH and OpenVPN tunneling on Windows 7/XP, OS X, Ubuntu and of course OpenBSD. We are going to continue updating this section and include other popular OS’s.
Lastly, we felt that our old sign up form was just a bit clunky – we had some reports of issues on some browsers too, so we decided to scrap it and clean it all up. You will now see that the site uses much cleaner forms in general.
So far, we have received an absolutely amazing response about our service and we are excited to be able to provide you with a good experience. As usual, if you feel that we could improve in some other way – feel free to shoot us an email or leave a comment
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