US-based IPVanish is an attractive VPN vendor with a long list of features, many of which you won't see often elsewhere. IPVanish has a reasonably sized network with over forty shared IP addresses and over 5 servers (XNUMX more since last review) in over XNUMX locations. Certain VPNs offer you more, but, the site explains, IPVanish is "the only leading provider of VPN services on the planet." The company owns and manages its servers instead of leasing other people's hardware, giving it much more control over how the network and servers are configured and run. It also tests a level of resources and expertise that you won't often see with other VPNs. IPVanish claims that each and every server supports Peer to Peer and, naturally, we were able to torrent from all XNUMX of our test locations.
IPVanish subscription options:- Twenty-four month plan: € two hundred and ninety-two per month (total cost of € seventy-eight)
A wide range of apps covers Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, even Amazon Fire TV, plus plenty of setup guides for routers, Linux, Chromebooks, and other platforms. Feel free to install, configure and configure as many devices as you like - IPVanish has no hard limits on the number of simultaneous connections you can use. We're guessing the company might get in touch if it hits twenty and on, but that's still a significant improvement over the typical five-device limit you'll get from many vendors. The huge new since our last review is that IPVanish now supports the turbocharged WireGuard protocol. If you prefer something else though, don't worry, IPVanish likes choice too: there's support for OpenVPN, IKEv2, L2TP, SSTP, and PPTP. 24/7 live chat support is available if you need it, but even here IPVanish offers a little more than we expected. There is phone support, with numbers in the US, UK, Australia, Mexico, Spain, Germany and Brazil.
IPVanish offers discounts off its regular cost when you subscribe to a longer plan (Image credit: IPVanish)
IPVanish Price
IPVanish's cost for their VPN service starts at a monthly bill of €50. The annual plan seems to be good value at $50 a month, but keep in mind that this is a unique introductory offer. Reduced to €53,99 upon renewal. IPVanish also offers a VPN + Backup plan with 89,99 GB of storage space in the SugarSync cloud. It's also only slightly more expensive, at $3 billed monthly, or $XNUMX a month for the first year of the annual plan, $XNUMX on renewal. If you use SugarSync regularly, this sounds like a great deal. Buy SugarSync directly from the SugarSync site and you're going to pay €XNUMX a month for XNUMX GB, so going for the IPVanish plan saves a lot of money and lets you get the VPN efficiently and for free. However, if you really don't need web hosting, moving to another VPN provider could lower your costs significantly. Private Internet Access has a three-year plan that costs just $XNUMX a month, for example, $XNUMX up-front payment. IPVanish's VPN-only plan costs €XNUMX for the first year, €XNUMX for years two and XNUMX; a total of €XNUMX. There's a XNUMX-day money-back guarantee, but be sure to check the fine print: it's for annual plans only. Plans billed monthly are not eligible.
IPVanish supports both credit cards and Paypal (Image credit: IPVanish) If you decide to sign up, IPVanish supports card and Paypal payments, but there is no Bitcoin support.
IPVanish protects your privacy with encryption and secure protocols (Image credit: IPVanish)
Privacy
The privacy of a VPN starts with the protocols and encryption it uses to protect your data. IPVanish still supports the old PPTP standard, which is so insecure that many vendors abandoned it a few years ago. But by default, IPVanish also supports the much better OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols, with WireGuard now also free. IPVanish's apps go further by giving you an uncommon level of control over your OpenVPN settings. The ability to select your OpenVPN port (6 or XNUMX) can help you connect, while the "OpenVPN Traffic Scramble" option reduces the chances of your VPN tunnel being detected or blocked in countries anti-VPN like China or else They will go. The Windows service client offers a kill switch, DNS, and even IPvXNUMX leak protection to reduce the risk of your traffic or identity being exposed online. Privacy benefits elsewhere include the ability for the iOS app to connect automatically when you access public Wi-Fi networks, but ignore others you think are safe (at home, at work, whoever they are). ). You can then let the VPN turn on and off as needed, keeping your privacy at all times.
Every single DNS leak test we've run has proven that IPVanish didn't discover our information (Image credit: IPVanish) To confirm that the service is truly anonymous, we check for leaks on sites like IPLeak, the DNS leak test and the leak test pages of multiple competing vendors (Astrill is a good example, but be careful, it's going to say it's fragile even if it doesn't notice any leaks). None of the tests found any issues, and the apps safeguard our identity and traffic at all times.
IPVanish does not hold any logs of its users (Image credit: IPVanish)
Registration
IPVanish's privacy policy begins with a clear and reassuring statement: "IPVanish is a provider of no-log VPN services, which means that we do not keep any connection logs, traffic, or activity data related to our services." The document goes on to explain how the company collects certain data through the site, its registration and payment procedures, but there's nothing you wouldn't expect: cookies, site analytics, email address, email, etc. There is a not so clear caveat. The policy states that IPVanish uses Google's Firebase to compile crash information, "to understand the source and cause of app crashes and to develop and thrive our services." What can this information contain and what happens to it? The policy does not state, beyond explaining that "this data does not refer to any personally identifiable information on our VPN." Lots of apps and services use app blockers, you've probably seen them yourself, but most ask during setup if you're ready to let them run. The IPVanish Windows app does not do this and has no settings that we can find to tell it whether the system is up or to opt out. This is not necessarily a VPN logging issue, but it could be a privacy issue, as crash data can include a lot of system information: device name or ID, account name, running process, execution, installed applications, core dumps, etc. This isn't essentially a bad thing - any and all developers can benefit from app crash information - but we'd like to see more clarity from IPVanish on how Firebase is used and why the system is enabled (which it wants). say that it does not send data unless you specifically give permission for this to happen). And while the company does better with its no-signup pledge, customers of the service shouldn't have to blindly trust the promises of a dealer's site. VPN vendors like ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and TunnelBear have tolerated outside companies auditing their systems and finding out what's really going on. Hopefully IPVanish, and the rest of the industry, will follow suit.
We have employed multiple speed test services to determine the performance of IPVanish (Image credit: nPerf)
We measured VPN performance by running multiple benchmarking services (SpeedTest site and command line app, SpeedOf.me, nPerf) from a UK data center and a US residential location. They have 1 Gbps connections. We run each benchmark 5 times with OpenVPN, 5 times with WireGuard, and start it again several hours later (that's a minimum of 720 tests), then we examine the data to see what happens. OpenVPN speeds in the UK were disappointing at XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps, and US results were only slightly better at XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps. Most of the best VPNs run somewhere in the XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps range in recent reviews, and Hide.me (XNUMX Mbps) and ProtonVPN (XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps) were even faster. IPVanish changed everything when we switched to WireGuard, with download speeds up to XNUMX Mbps from our UK location, XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps in the US. NordVPN (XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps) and Mozilla Firefox ( XNUMX-XNUMX Mbps) have handled something comparable in recent tests.
In our tests, IPVanish was unable to let us watch Netflix in the US (Image credit: Netflix)
Netflix and streaming
IPVanish claims to offer "secure access to your favorite streaming sites... without buffering or latency interruptions." That hasn't always been our experience in previous reviews, but we were keen to see how the service performed this time around. We got off to a good start, bypassing BBC iPlayer's VPN defenses and allowing us to stream whatever we wanted. We haven't had any success with Disney Plus, although it's not clear why. We tried 5 IPVanish locations in the US and were unable to connect to any of them. Moving to the app didn't help, it just told us "sorry something went wrong, please try again later". Both glitches went away when we closed our IPVanish connection, so our best guess is that the site had a problem with our IP address. The story was not repeated with US Netflix, where IPVanish was unable to give us access to all 5 test locations. And the bad news continued until the end, when Amazon Prime Video warned the VPN and refused to stream anything.
IPVanish offers service customers an extensive plurality of platforms (Image credit: IPVanish)
Client configuration
IPVanish directly supports a wide range of platforms, with free service clients for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Fire TV. There are no browser extensions, but the support pages have setup guides for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, as well as tutorials covering routers, Chromebooks, Linux, and more. The download links for the app are easy to find on the site and, conveniently, you don't need to log into your IPVanish account to access them. There are no big surprises throughout the service client setup process (or even little surprises, for that matter). Windows and Mac service clients install like any other, iOS and Android apps can be installed from their respective app stores, and there's a bonus direct download from the...