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IPVanish review: the number of servers, the pricing, and everything else you need to know about its VPN service
IPVanish is included in the cohort of the most popular VPN services of today, along with ExpressVPN and NordVPN. But is IPVanish good like authors tend to describe in their IPVanish reviews? Continue reading our own IPVanish review to find out whether VPN Vanish is really worth paying for it. Since we have already touched upon that topic, let’s start our IPVanish review with a detailed overlook of their pricing policies.
IPVanish pricing: quite expensive but with decent discounts
As confirmed by other IPVanish reviews, this service doesn’t offer a great variety of plans. As of now, there are only three service plans:
- The 1-month plan comes at a price of $11.99 though the company currently offers a 17% discount on this particular plan, so the final price for this package would be $10. Frankly speaking, this package is a bit pricey, but not as expensive as, for instance, ExpressVPN.
- The 3-month plan can be purchased for $26.99 per month which includes the 25% discount. The usual price of this plan is $35.97. In case you choose this particular service plan, you will be billed the mentioned sum every three months.
- The 1-year plan is promoted as the most lucrative deal. Its total cost is $143.33, but given the 46% discount, you would have to pay only $77.99, which will be billed on the yearly basis. The monthly price of this package is \$6.49 (given that you’ll purchase it while the discount is still viable), which is a very good price, especially compared to other well-known VPN services.
Since we are trying to make our IPVanish review as detailed and comprehensible as possible, we ought to mention the available payment methods. The older IPVanish reviews, which you may have read earlier, include Bitcoin as one of the available payment options, but, unfortunately, it is no longer available. Let’s continue our IPVanish review with the latest list of available payment methods:
- Visa;
- Mastercard;
- Discover;
- American Express;
- JCB;
- Delta;
- Paypal.
And that’s it! As you can see, the VPN Vanish doesn’t offer a plethora of payment options which, frankly speaking, is not very beneficial for their image of the anonymity tool provider, because all the payment methods, mentioned in this IPVanish review, presume a certain disclosure of personal information by the users. Nevertheless, this set of payment options is rather standard, so if you are not really concerned about sharing this information with the VPN provider, then you can safely use any of these methods. As you have already understood from our IPVanish review, this company doesn’t offer any free plans, even with the minimum volume of data, or trial periods, which is obviously a downside because the majority of other VPN providers offer at least one of these options to their users. The only thing that the potential users of IPVanish apk can count on is the 7-day money-back guarantee which is also not satisfactory enough, especially when compared to the 30-day money-back-guarantee offered by the competitors.
Perhaps these rather disappointing characteristics would be compensated by the amount and the quality of provided services. The official website promises that the above-mentioned service plans include the following features:
- The state-of-the-art VPN software with the best download/upload speed in the industry;
- Over 1 thousand servers located in more than 60 countries around the world;
- Unrestricted bandwidth;
- Superior level of protection ensured by the use of the newest version of AES-256 encryption algorithm;
- Strict adherence to the no-logging policy;
- Hassle-free unblocking of websites and app, the access to which is restricted for residents of certain countries;
- IPVanish torrent speed of the higher-than-average speed;
- Protected browsing environment thanks to the employment of OpenVPN and L2Tp/IPSec security protocols;
- The app with the intuitive and understandable interface that is compatible with all popular operating systems;
- Unrestricted switching of servers;
- The user can simultaneously connect up to 10 devices from a single paid account;
- Competent and timely technical support;
- The IPVanish kill switch which shuts down the Internet connection in case of the suspected intrusion.
The list is quite impressive, and it is necessary to give IPVanish VPN a credit for including such a vast amount of features in all of their service plans, regardless of their price.
Let’s continue our IP Vanish review with the detailed examination of these points.
IPVanish VPN: the speed factor
It is a well-known fact that the usage of VPN software exerts a certain impact on user’s browsing experience which may result in considerably slower download/upload speed and higher latency, especially if the user establishes the VPN connection through a server that’s located far from his or her current place of residence. Before writing this and other IPVanish reviews, we had a certain degree of skepticism about the speed indexes of this VPN which were highly praised in other IP Vanish reviews, but after running some rigorous speed test, we have come to conclusion that IPVanish VPN is really one of the fastest anonymity tools on the market today. Given that the speed of our Internet connection was around 100 Mbps, the IPVanish VPN displayed pretty amazing results:
We decided to test three servers at different locations and see whether other IPVanish reviews, which claimed that this VPN is one of the fastest, were right. The first one up was the EU server located somewhere in the Netherlands. Well, it is safe to say that all those IPVanish reviews were right: this VPN reduced the download speed only by 17% which is amazing. It was one of the best results ever displayed by the VPN software! The upload speed was around 45 Mbps, which is pretty decent, with 38ms ping. Hands down, that is the best speed test result: with IPVanish, you can surf the Web anonymously without being constantly irritated by the subpar speed. This leads to the conclusion that IPVanish torrent downloading capacities are also quite impressive. It took us about 12 minutes to download a 15GB movie of Blu-Ray quality. These speed results are relevant only if you are connecting to these servers while residing somewhere within EU. In other cases, the results may be different, just make sure to choose the appropriately located server and run some speed tests. However, when we connected to the US server, the download/upload speed dropped significantly (to about 33 Mbps – download and 23 Mbps – upload) while the ping went through the roof – 135ms. This means that if you are mostly visiting the US websites, such as HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Crackle, etc., you may be disappointed with the performance of IPVanish.
IPVanish Netflix unblocking capabilities
We have even worse news for those of you who place hopes on the IPVanish Netflix unblocking capacities: it turns out that Netflix has specifically included most of IPVanish servers in their VPN-detection algorithms, so bypassing the Netflix access restriction for non-US residents would pose a great challenge. When writing this IPVanish VPN review, we have contacted their tech support and asked them to clarify this situation. The support answered that the only way to unblock Netflix through IPVanish is to use their OverPlay Smart DNS service which will come at the additional price. Nevertheless, after numerous tries and failures we’ve managed to access Netflix through the IPVanish server in Chicago. However, there is no guarantee that this particular server hasn’t been banned already by Netflix. This brings us to the next part of our IPVanish review.
IPVanish servers
The official website, as well as many IP Vanish reviews, state that this company has more than 40 thousand IPs available on over 1 thousand servers which are located in 60 countries around the world. The majority of servers are situated in the United States and Europe. Unlike some other VPN providers, IPvanish doesn’t offer any special servers or features that could somehow diversify its rather trivial set of services. To make the matters worse, it turns out that IPVanish isn’t compatible with the Onion network which means that you won’t be able to use the TOR browser to ensure the additional level of protection against cyber criminals or government surveillance.
IPVanish protocols
IPVanish uses a good variety of protocols to ensure the flexible and undisrupted Internet connection.
IKEv2 is the advanced extension of the IPSec protocol that allows for the undisrupted connection when switching between different types of the Internet connection, for instance, from Wi-Fi to mobile network.
OpenVPN is a standard protocol used by most VPN providers to prevent the loss of sensitive data and ensure quicker access speed.
The L2TP protocol is used to allow the use of IPVanish of mobile devices which aren’t fully compatible with the OpenVPN protocol.
The SSTP protocol is in many ways similar to OpenVPN with the only difference being that thanks to the SSTP protocol, the anonymized traffic may look like an organic one that comes from the user’s web browser.
The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) is the type of protocol that’s used mainly on older versions of operating systems and devices. It is rather efficient but also has many flaws, especially when it comes to data leakage, so make sure to use it only as the final recourse, when the rest of the protocols didn’t manage to get the job done.
Security provision
Now we have come to the question asked by almost all users who consider purchasing this VPN client, “Is IPVanish safe?” IPVanish utilizes the AES 256-bit encryption which is an industry standard. Basically, that is the only type of encryption used by this service, and in most cases, it is sufficient for safe and untraceable browsing. However, the issue with the IPVanish security lies in another realm, particularly its jurisdiction. IPVanish is the United States-based company and, as some of you may know, the government of this country is one of the founders of UKUSA (United Kingdom – United States Agreement) Community which is also known as the odious 14 Eyes, an international alliance of intelligence agencies which monitor the online activity in the respective countries. It means that IPVanish, particularly its owner, the company called Mudhook Media Inc. are subject to the data retention laws. To put it simply, this company would be obliged to provide all information about the activity of their users upon request from the authorities. Although IPVanish claims that they abide by their strict no-logging policy, it is still largely unclear which type of information they are gathering and who they may pass it to. Obviously, this should be a big concern, especially for those of you whose online activity is not limited to watching favorite TV series on HBO.
Compatibility and device connection limit
IPVanish is fully compatible with all major operating systems and even Windows Phone and some models of routers. Therefore, you can safely use IPVanish Windows 10, Linux etc. The IPVanish Windows 10 has one interesting feature which is called LAN blocking. It prohibits all third-party devices, which are located near you, from communicating with your gadget while you use a local network. IPVanish also has one interesting feature which is called VPN for Kodi. For those of you who don’t know what Kodi is, it is a platform that facilitates online entertainment experience of its users. This platform is formerly known as XBMC. Basically, it allows users to enjoy digital content through add-ons like Hulu, BBC iPlayer etc., anywhere in the world without worrying about being blocked by a corporate firewall. Currently, IPVanish allows 10 simultaneous connections on various devices.
The bottom line
We would like to finalize this IPVanish VPN review by providing the list of pros and cons of this VPN service.
Pros
- Great download/upload speed;
- Plenty of servers in many countries of the world;
- Wide choice of protocols.
Cons
- No trial version;
- A rather discomforting jurisdiction;
- Very poor Netflix unblocking capabilities.
