According to r/VPNTorrents, Proton and AirVPN are the only recommended VPNs since they are the only well-established privacy-respecting ones left that still have port-forwarding. New ones are popping up with promise, like Azire and a couple others, but time will tell. As for Proton, I decided against it because of its limited port forwarding and lack of IPv6 compatibility and settled on AirVPN But Proton has genuinely great products if you're interested in the full suite. AirVPN, in my opinion, is just the last great VPN. Open-source & fully featured client, run by activists, anonymous accounts, crypto purchasing, IPv6 compatibility, full port forwarding, great support, Tor integration, the list goes on.
They're super transparent with whatever they have going on with them. They had one probe within the last couple years but they don't keep logs so I'm not sure anything bad for the users is possible, and what VPN hasn't been asked for it's information lol
No, the ports expire, but you can script the renewal / new port process via their API. I want to set up a job that gets a new port like 1x per week and tells it to the applicating using the port. Haven't done that yet. So far my port stayed active for like a month.
The speed can fluctuate as users pop on and off a server, but in general I have gotten excellent speeds (100mbps+). If ever I am getting poor throughput I swap to a different random server until I get what I need. I do not torrent with it though so I am not sure how it fares with that use.
I have not. Especially with the desktop client, which automatically will switch to another server if you get dropped. As far as speeds, I've also never noticed a problem but my bottleneck is my ISP so it's hard to know.