Same here. I, too, use Private Internet Access. I chose this one over a previously used VPN, because PIA does not "leak" URL requests to my ISP. The data encryption is complete between my computer and PIA's nodes.
However, I have been unable to load a page from Free Republic for about a week now. Knowing that FR has been the object of DOS attacks for a while now, I just assumed that there was another attack - a particularly successful one! But, I saw no notice about this at FR's Facebook interface, nor the one at Yahoo Groups.
So, I began to suspect that the problem was peculiar to my own computer or something. First thing I decided to try is to disable the VPN. Bingo!
Why would using a VPN result in no page from FR loading? I haven't a clue. I'm way too non-techie to even hazard a guess. But, I'm going to follow this thread in case some other FR tech-pro can shed light on this problem.
See my post 15.
I’m not on a VPN but I gave up last night because the pages weren’t loading. We have really fast internet but this was the only site hard to load.
Because one of the blocked IP addresses from the DDOS fix, was yours.