IPVanish VPN review – Technical consultant

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IPVanish starts well, with an easy-to-install app and a visual tutorial to help you get going. You will be connected to one of its servers in a wide range of countries in no time. However, after examining the finer details, we came across some negative aspects that are difficult to ignore. Find out more in our full review on IPvanish.

Prices

Let's start with the price. IPVanish is among the most expensive VPN options. Its cheaper is the one-year subscription, which costs $ 77.99 (about £ 61), so it works at $ 6.49 (£ 5.10) a month. This is a savings over the one-month option, which is $ 10 (£ 7.80), and the three-month option that is priced at $ 26.99 (£ 21.05) as well $ 8.99 (£ 7) per month.

You can pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, JCB, Delta or Paypal but there are no anonymous gift cards or payment options with coins available.

There's a 7-day money back guarantee, which should be long enough to help you figure out if it's the service for you.

You can register here.

Features

IPVanish is headquartered in the United States and therefore in the highest range of "14 eyes" countries that share cyber-intelligence. This will be one of the main ideas for the privacy advocates, so if you are, you should take a look at our list of the best VPNs to choose a different service that's right for you.

Otherwise, IPVanish is easy to install, so once you've created an account, you'll be up and running. You will be followed by a step-by-step guide on how to use it, and there are video tutorials available on your website if you find something that confuses the installation or the installation process.

If you're not particular about which server you connect to, it's as easy as clicking on a button, but you can also choose to narrow down the field to a particular country and let IPvanish choose the right server or choose your server from the list provided. There are over 1,100 servers in 60 countries.

You can choose your server from a search list, a map or a list that you can filter based on latency or region. We would have liked to have a list that helps you choose a server based on what you plan to use it, such as streaming, privacy and file sharing. We have seen this from other VPNs, including CyberGhost and PureVPN.

Like many other solutions we've seen, by default all DNS requests sent over the VPN will be resolved using the VPN provider's DNS servers. This is important as it ensures that such traffic does not give clues about browsing habits.

In addition, in line with other VPN solutions, IPVanish does not maintain any data connections or registers and does not store the metadata related to the use of the VPN.

Unfortunately, we were not able to use IPVanish to connect to Netflix or BBC iPlayer during our tests. We have tried several different servers without any results.

There is no chat service with IPVanish (many others at the top of our VPN chart offer 24-hour support via chat, which we found incredibly useful in the past), so we contacted email support. It took about 24 hours to respond and the answer was essentially that IPVanish will not always work with Netflix but we can keep trying, so it was not very helpful.

The interface of the desktop app is not the most beautiful and some data on the default screen may be hidden to prevent beginners from feeling overwhelmed. But once you know what you're looking at and the information that is actually useful to you is intuitive.

And of course, for those who like extra data, having the time connected, the protocol and a graph showing the bandwidth fluctuations is reassuring.

There were a couple of occasions when the app was completely blocked, and another that seemed to bring the whole computer to a halt that could only be resolved with a forced reboot. Since then the app has been updated and seems to work more smoothly.

It is not immediately obvious where access to more advanced features is in the IPVanish app on macOS. You will have to go to the navigation bar at the top of the screen and choose Preferences. On Windows, the settings are inside the app's interface, so they are much easier to find.

Here you can choose to change the IP address to a range of our choice, which adds an additional level of security, but means that the connection is temporarily interrupted during the switchover. The kill switch is disabled by default, but you can activate it in the settings menu.

You'll have 10 simultaneous connections with an IPVanish account, which is one of the highest we've seen, but we're not sure how useful it is in reality. It sounds certainly impressive, but we do not know many people who will have to connect using ten devices.

applications

In addition to the Windows and MacOS versions, you can also get IPvanish apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Ubuntu, Chromebooks and select routers. There is also an & # 39; app for Amazon Fire TV Stick.

We found the iOS app more intuitive than the desktop version and had no problems with interruption or connection problems. We have not yet been able to use it for streaming services, including Netflix and BBC iPlayer.

The installation and use of Android are as easy as downloading from the Play Store and access.

IPVanish also has an option to install its software on some home router models. This involves the installation of new system software and is not technically naive, even if the online tutorials are very thorough.

Performance

It is very difficult to test the performance of a VPN, as it can vary from day to day and from hour to hour. The server you choose and the path used to get to that server will have an impact on performance, as well as your broadband connection.

IPVanish shows a graph of current download and upload speeds, which you can use to monitor performance while you are using it. We have tested IP losses and DNS losses and we could not find them, which of course is essential to keep your privacy intact.

Verdict

IPVanish protects your privacy and, for the most part, works well if it's all you need. But if you're trying to connect to Netflix, BBC iPlayer and other streaming services you might be disappointed, and the support offered is not as good as rivals when you need help.

If you consider that it is more expensive than some of the others we have tested, this makes IPVanish difficult to recommend for most readers.

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