IPVanish

Description

IPVanish Review & Rating

IPVanish was created and established way back in 2014 (that’s a long time in the digital world!). Since that time they’ve established themselves as a service that offers good value for money and turned themselves into a very good VPN service overall. But let’s take a better look at what they have to offer so you can decide whether or not you should spend your money on them.

VPN Security

The first thing that one can notice with IPVanish is that they talk mostly about their service, they don’t just bombard you with plans, promotions, and whatnot, like many other VPN providers. They actually point out the quality of their service. Security is one of those services.

IPVanish employs a strong and secure OpenVPN encryption which can be ranked together with military grade encryption. They also offer two other protocols: L2TP and PPTP, both of which you won’t have to use due to the quality of the industry standard, the OpenVPN protocol. Also, PPTP is practically useless, as it is outdated and considered unsafe.

Furthermore, their security features work particularly well on mobile phones, which is definitely a huge plus. They offer a network block feature which can effectively protect you from hackers who try to get to peoples’ data when they are connected to free public WiFis.

IPVanish naturally has a killswitch, as any other decent VPN service does. You can also expect unlimited data allowance and there will be no bandwidth limiting either.

In addition to all of this, they also feature the always needed DNS leak protection and a so-called Xor stealth mode.

VPN Privacy

Most VPN providers offer a no logs policy, which is what any regular VPN user would want. But as is often the case, these no logs policies usually come with additional stipulations, amendments and whatnot, which in reality changes their ‘no logs’ policy to a ‘we-keep-just-a-tiny-amount-of-logs’ policy.

For that reason, we dug around for you to see how much IPVanish respects their zero traffic logs policy. The result of the search was more than good. It was actually great. They don’t just keep zero logs of your traffic, but they don’t even store data like connection times, bandwidth use, etc. That’s actually quite amazing and different to most other VPNs, as this is in every way a no logs policy.

What’s even more surprising is that they are located in the US, and if you are not already familiar, the USA is probably one of the worst locations for VPNs as their laws often make VPN providers hand out their user data to the CIA and NSA. IPVanish seems to be safe from this, which is definitely a huge success for them.

Features & Add-Ons

Signing up for IPVanish is pretty straightforward and easy. Their website is easy to navigate (even though the client isn’t) and you’ll get to where you want to get in no time. There are occasional problems when signing up, the usual stuff that happens with every other VPN provider. As always, in such instances, you’ll have to get help from customer support. How IPVanish customer support fairs, we will talk about later in the article.

Now we get to the Windows client, which is probably the only downside of IPVanish. However, we should first point out that the Windows client is not the only client they offer. As per their 10 simultaneous connections on different devices, you can expect that they cover a wide range of different devices.

In addition to Windows, they offer clients for Mac as well, then for Android and iOS, and they have detailed setup instructions for Chromebook, Linux, Amazon Fire TV/Fire Stick, for routers, and much more.

All of those clients perform well, including Windows, which is only problematic for its unnecessary complexity and downright weirdness, making it a bit hard to use until you get used to it.

The client is simply crammed with different features, and if you are a long time VPN user, you’ll know that an overwhelming number of clients from all sorts of VPN providers offer simplicity.

The IPVanish Windows client doesn’t offer a simple double-click connection, they actually offer you the choice to select a country, city, server, then they offer filters for all of this, and much more. This actually sounds good when you look at it, but the problem is that it doesn’t always work well and you have to get used to it in order to learn how to operate the client.

They also offer a Simple Mode for their client, so beginners will be happy, but it too doesn’t work well all the time. One of the problems we found is that IPVanish often works badly when you have other VPNs or low-level network applications installed. Nothing serious, but it something worth knowing.

However, when you get around this small annoyance, you can expect an overall amazing experience with a lot of features that will all work great.

You can expect IPVanish to work fantastically when it comes to geo-restricted and blocked websites. Their system has no problems changing a country and can avoid basically any block that you can encounter on the web. The only service that it can’t unblock is US Netflix.

Another interesting feature IPVanish offers is a SOCKS5 proxy, which is a very versatile proxy that works with all type of traffic. Very few VPNs offer SOCKS5, which is why we were surprised that IPVanish does. The main thing to know about this feature is that it offers very fast speeds but it doesn’t provide encryption.

VPN Free Trials and Money Back Guarantees

IPVanish, unfortunately, doesn’t offer a free trial, but they do offer a more than decent 7-day refund. Unlike with many other services, this 7 day grace period actually comes with no strings attached. We tested it out, and you can be certain that they won’t ask for a reason for your subscription cancellation. You can cancel at any point during those 7 days.

There was an interesting thing we noticed when testing them out. When you go to the payment page after you have decided to purchase their service, you should stay there for a while, chose your payment method and then switch to another browser and you’ll likely get an offer of a discount. We are not sure if this always happens, but it’s definitely worth a shot.

Also, when it comes to payments, they support a wide range of payment methods. If you don’t want to use a card or PayPal, you can use Giropay, DineroMail, CashU, and more. They used to have the option to pay with Bitcoins, but unfortunately for all of the cryptocurrency lovers, they removed this option fairly recently.

It’s also worth noting that the prices they have are fairly similar to most other VPN providers, making IPVanish a great choice for your VPN.

VPN Speed

Speed test should be seen as a guide to help weed out the time wasters. However don’t expect exactly the same results when you get your VPN up and running, your location to the exchange, ISP settings and server router choices will all affect your final VPN speeds.

Our team is strongly independent and our reviews and speed tests are impartial. We are openly transparent about receiving referral fees from certain providers when you click our links and sign up for a VPN, however, these commercial relationships have no bearing on the contents of our reviews and recommendations.

Customer Support

Customer support has never been a strong suit of IPVanish, but in their defence, customer support is rarely good in general.

However, you will be glad to know that they have actively started to improve this part of their service. They are still rather slow with their response from time to time, but in other areas, they have improved significantly.

A live chat has been added to their website, which is definitely a big plus. Naturally, we tested the live chat a few times and always got a response straight away. As for the regular support via email, you will usually get a response relatively soon, but it might take them a whole day from time to time.