I use Proton VPN for privacy reasons and believe, given the modern state of the internet and the current political climate here in the US, its foolish not to use something. 

Proton blocks a number of questionable tracker type URLS, which I suspect a number of renderosity ads reference. The end result is that opening a product page can sometimes take several minutes while it tries to connect to questionable sites like "static.addtoany.com" and "connect.facebook.com", etc. During this time, none of the page interactions work, making it largely unusable until your scripts finally give up and finish loading the rest of the content.

Also, it isn't uncommon that, after a reboot, the IP the VPN hands me is blacklisted on this site, resulting in a 403 error. The only way to access the site at that point is to log off the VPN (or change which region to use and hope to get one you haven't black listed). This isn't really the best way to treat customers who are willing to pay money, IMHO. I realize that VPNs are often used by folks to do malicious stuff, but blacklisting IP addresses won't really stop them for long since they'll just switch to a new one and continue doing whatever they were doing. Meanwhile, you are risking customers deciding to no longer deal with the hassle and take their business elsewhere. 

Hello!

Using a VPN service is a good idea in my opinion. In general, no matter where you live. I understand privacy concerns. But I usually use a different method(most of the time). I have the NoScript add-on for the browser (that blocks anything that isn't renderosity itself).
And I'm using uMatrix, which filters the rest (but that takes some effort). I don't see any Facebook stuff. I've never seen or heard of "addtoany.com". And the page loads quickly (faster than DAZ for example).

Maybe that's worth a test.

A number of Proton VPN's servers appear to be blacklisted.  Likely because vat some point people using IP adresses from those server pools used them for nefarious purposes.

I have permanently removed several blacklisted servers from my servers lists in the hopes of avoiding such issues.

KageRyu posted at 12:17 AM Sun, 18 October 2026 - #4510902

A number of Proton VPN's servers appear to be blacklisted.  Likely because vat some point people using IP adresses from those server pools used them for nefarious purposes.

I have permanently removed several blacklisted servers from my servers lists in the hopes of avoiding such issues.

@cattlefish, I use Firefox and uMatrix doesn't seem to run in that browser, but...your suggestion got me digging and my uBlock Origin can do the same thing! After turning on advanced settings, I was able to filter those two domains and the pages now load as quickly as one could expect. 

My thanks to you both!

Another thing to check - if you use blocklists and/or blocklist managers and you use publicly available lists I recommend keeping a lof file of blocks.  When you run into connectivity and blocking issues, check the logs to see if the I.P. address your VPN has assigned is being blocked by your blocklists.  Sadly this does happen as VPN addresses and sometimes entire pools will be rated as sources of ill intent when people misuse them.  Many of the free VPN servers are on such blocklists as bad actors because so many have misused them.