IPVanish VPN Service Review

Features
By William Van Winkle
published

In addition to our own test results and experiences, we're also providing a reader-based assessment of leading VPN service IPVanish.

Four-Star Reader Ratings

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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: What got me to sign up for IPV over other services was their response to a question from a site doing a review. The question was about giving any user information to any gov't agency and the response was something like this (paraphrasing): "In the event a government agency contacted us for any information we have on any registered user, we would be legally bound to tell them about the nothing that we have." Also, some times it does speed up downloads and youtube videos buffer much faster, I can usually stream 1440p or 1080p60 seamlessly.✗ Cons: Connection is reliable 85-90% of the time, some days I'll drop from online games up to a dozen times while connected to a server less than 10 miles away and reporting 25ms ping (ping in games shoots up above 500ms at times). I do think my ISP is partly to blame though.☁ Comments: Dont know much about the finer details of VPN services but after 6 months of use, IPVanish seems to be just ok. (My 1st and only VPN experience thus far).
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Price & effectiveness.✗ Cons: Have to logon at bootup.☁ Comments: Fair introductary price, selection of servers & NO ID users records.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Large amount of servers I can choose to log on to for my service.✗ Cons: Nothing yet.☁ Comments: The customer services rock, and and speed rocks also.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Seems like they have servers everywhere and the list is still growing.✗ Cons: Android client needs work. Prefer the native manual setup.☁ Comments: Solid performance but android client app feels slow and looks like it was designed in the froyo days.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Cheap as chips, and came recommended from others in the industry. other than that, can't say really.✗ Cons: Lack of configuration options.  It recently updated, and took away my ability to choose the type of tunnel etc. that might work for the stupid, but alas, the current way of the world says anyone using a vpn is not in that catagory.☁ Comments: Nothing is perfect, and I've struggled to renew my password a few times.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: It works and gives me access to many locations.✗ Cons: When VPN drops, it could expose my real IP if I do not detect it changing.☁ Comments: VPN provides security and their system works as expected.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Their VPN is fast, they continue to add servers so none is overloaded with users, and they are torrent friendly.✗ Cons: They allow only one OpenVPN connection, no port forwarding and no access to a proxy.☁ Comments: Could have offered some additional features PIA offers, like port forwarding and proxy server, for extra costs.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: Varied server location and excellent connection speeds.✗ Cons: Need more robust encryption options needed. Clarification of retention of data policy and transparency of requests from Gov's. Way of stating they are complying with Gov requests without breaking gag rules imposed.☁ Comments: Ease of use , good connection speed, good declared policy of not tracking, and decent encryption algorithms.
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☆ Rating: ★★★★✓ Pros: fast connection, stable, n always succesful in ip change.✗ Cons: only 2 devices, no manual changes for encryption settings.☁ Comments: Fast and easy to connect, and no dns leak.
William Van Winkle