If you want to get in to private trackers at some point, Mullvad isn’t an option because they don’t support port forwarding. Just a PSA because Mullvad does monthly payments, so you’ll be able to switch anytime.
Proton VPN and AirVPN do support port forwarding.
As your already on Linux I’d recommend running qBittorrent with Docker behind gluetun.
This makes it so only qBittorrent is behind the VPN and all other traffic (e.g. browsing, gaming) goes as if there was no VPN.
The “stunning victory” the MPA wanted to have might not be as good of an deterrent, as it seemed at first. They only focus on a few movies, half of them might not even be relevant to the case, and the operators didn’t make much money on them, so they won’t be able to pay much damages.
If they don’t receive a prison sentence, and only need to pay below 20.000 USD where’s the deterrent for other operators overseas?
250 connections really is not much. I ran a matrix server for a while and joining a few large rooms (1k+ servers) made the connections reach a few thousand – which made the router slow down/unstable/reboot.
I’ve noticed the same for my upload bandwitdh, with it being 170%-200% of its advertised maximum speed. Sadly the same can’t be said about the download bandwidth. Luckily fiber will be available in a few months.
Most (all?) torrent clients support limiting the number of active connections. This should prevent your router from being overloaded.
In my experience 500 shouldn’t be a problem. On that note, limiting upload bandwidth to something less than the available upload bandwidth is important too.
Given it seems to be a single guy doing his thing I don’t expect them to get bought out.
It’s a great service and incredibly cheap. With advanced pricing I’m only paying ~0,40€ per month. My domain + purelymail is less than I’d pay for other providers email only.
Edit: If Amazon increases their prices they’ll have to pass it on, but those should be pretty consistent. If you use your own domain (or an alias service) switching email providers is simple anyway.