IPVanish VPN Service Review

Test Results

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When we selected any of IPVanish’s three Seattle servers, Speedtest.net reported us as being right around Cocoa, FL, just east of Orlando. Clearly, there can be a difference between the server you select and the IP address you receive. We substituted the next closest location, San Jose, CA, and observed the same thing. When we moved off the coast into Phoenix, AZ, though, Speedtest matched our expectations. London similarly matched server and IP locations with no issues. The closest IPVanish server to Syria is in Israel, which we thought might have an unfair infrastructure advantage. Thus we took a hop westward to Istanbul, Turkey. Once again, while Whatismyip.com correctly placed us in Instanbul, Speedtest.net believed we were working from the island of Cyprus. Ugh. As download speeds from Instanbul/Cyprus were terrible — well under 1 Mb/s — we switched to Tel Aviv, which detected correctly and provided better numbers. (Torguard had the same Istanbul/Cyprus issue.)

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IPVanish's Israel server trounces HMA's Syrian system, and while we're hard pressed for apples to apples comparisons, we'd say that IPVanish's flagship West Coast site in Vancouver trails HMA!'s downloads out of Seattle -- and that's with Seattle not being HMA's choicest option. On the other hand, IPVanish's London site outperforms HMA!'s. The moral of the story may well be that you need to try the server(s) in the location of your choice before picking a service. However, IPVanish does switch between servers faster than HMA!.

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