IPVanish Review

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Features

IPVanish provides all the advanced VPN features you would expect to get from a top-of-the-range VPN service. These include:

• A VPN for Windows, Mac OS X, macOS, iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire users
• Allowance of up to 10 simultaneous connections
• Easy-to-use client interface
• Unlimited data allowance and no bandwidth limiting
• Killswitch
• DNS leak protection
• OpenVPN, L2TP, and PPTP encryption
• Zero logs policy
• Servers in 60 countries
• A pool of more than 40,000 IP addresses across 1000 servers>
• P2P permitted
• SOCKS5 web proxy
• XOR obfuscated servers
• Accepts PayPal as well as credit cards
• 30 money-back guarantee
• Unblocks Netflix US (but not BBC iPlayer or Amazon Prime)
• Split tunneling so that customers can stay protected and still be able to use Netflix, BBC iPlayer, or other local services

IPVanish has in excess of 1000 servers located in 60 countries around the world. The company is extremely strong in Europe and the US - but also has servers in useful locations like Australia, Brazil, Japan, Asia, and South Africa.

IPVanish does not have servers in Russia. If you need a VPN to unblock Russian services (to unblock VK in Ukraine, for example) -or if you require Russian servers for privacy - you will need to look elsewhere. To be fair on IPVanish, many VPNs have decided to stop providing servers in Russia due to new laws that bring into question the privacy levels that can be promised on servers within the nation. So this is a valid omission.

SOCKS5 Proxy

SOCKS5 is a versatile proxy that works with any kind of traffic. IPVanish is one of the few VPNs that provides a SOCKS5 proxy for free when you sign up to the VPN. IPVanish VPN also provides a number of excellent guides for using SOCKS5 (with Deluge or uTorrent, for example).  The benefit of a SOCK5 proxy is fast speeds, but do bear in mind that it does not provide encryption like the VPN client.

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Speed and Performance

We test IPVanish connection speeds three times a day using a unique server-based scientific speed testing method. For more information on how those speed tests work please read: VPN Speed Testing Done Right. As is always the case, IPVanish is currently performing excellently. It is one of the fastest VPN services available on the market. That is why IPVanish is so good for data-intensive tasks such as streaming in HD, gaming, and torrenting.

As you can see in the graph below, in the last few months IPVanish has been sandwiched in amongst some of the best VPNs in the world - which all have above average connection speeds. An average of 34 Mbps (across all 4 servers we test) is truly outstanding and means that IPVanish is excellent for data-intensive tasks.

The DNS lookup time can slow down the process of fetching a page from a web server. IPVanish performed very well in this area. The average lookup time is just 0.41 seconds - which makes it one of the fastest VPNs on the market in terms of lookup times! 

IPVanish's connection times put it in the top rank of VPNs. VPN connection times do not get any better than this!

As you can see, IPVanish scores extremely well in these tests and is one of the few VPNs that can claim to be among the fastest in the world. 

Leak tests

I connected to one of the IPVanish London VPN servers to test for leaks using ipleak.net. I discovered no detectable IP Leaks or DNS leaks. My IP address correctly appeared in London as did the single DNS address. WebRTC leaks performed in Chrome also came back negative on my system.

My internet service provider does not use IPv6 addresses and so I was unable to test for IPv6 leaks.

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Price

IPVanish only has one service plan, which can be purchased for three different subscription periods. Consumers are rewarded for committing for a longer period of time. Subscribers are given the option to get either a one month, three months, or a yearly subscription.

A subscription to IPVanish is recurring. If you do not cancel the VPN at the end of your subscription period - you will automatically be billed the same subscription fee again.

All subscribers are given a 30-day money back guarantee to change their mind if they wish. This is even true of the one-month subscription.

Consumers can pay for IPVanish in a large number of different ways, which is awesome. Credit cards and PayPal are accepted as are some other virtual options. However, IPVanish does not accept Bitcoin payments (or any other cryptocurrencies).

Payment Processing

Credit card payments are processed on behalf of IPVanish by the third-party payment handler Chase for most payments. WorldPay is used for some international payment types. Payments are also handled by Paypal and Apple if you purchase using these options.

These are reputable payment handlers. What's more, having payments managed by a third party means that payment records and subscription records are kept at arm's length from each other - which theoretically has some advantages.

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Ease of Use

Privacy and Security

IPVanish has reliable software that is packed with advanced security features. Some of those features are particularly useful on mobile devices - such as the network block feature, which protects you against connections to unsafe open networks with no password requirements (which are sometimes set up in public places by hackers). And which your device could connect to automatically.

In addition, it has a killswitch, DNS leak protection, Xor stealth mode (scramble), OpenVPN port selection, auto-connect, and launch at startup. A truly complete suite of VPN features!

Encryption Protocols

IPVanish provides three different kinds of VPN protocols: OpenVPN, L2TP, and PPTP. PPTP is an outdated encryption protocol that is no longer considered secure and should never be used for privacy. Out of the three available protocols, we recommend that you stick to OpenVPN.

IPVanish implements Open VPN using an AES cipher. IPVanish implements AES with a 256-bit key, which is the strongest cipher used for VPN encryption today. Handshake, hash auth, RSA keys, and Perfect Forward Secrecy, are also important components of the overall encryption standard. So those must be analyzed too...

The weakest part of IPVanish' OpenVPN encryption is the HMAC SHA1 handshake. However, this does meet our recommended standards for privacy. Thus, all of the necessary components of the protocol on both the data and control channels are considered secure. Good news indeed.

To conclude: IPVanish is great for data security from an encryption standpoint. It even implements Perfect Forward Secrecy (DHE-2048).

Privacy

Being based in the US is enough to put some people off IPVanish. This is because being based in the US is not "ideal" for any company that provides a privacy service. Why? Because the US is the home of the CIA and the NSA - and is also a part of the 5 Eyes surveillance agreement.

In the US, firms can be served both warrants and gag orders, which means that they could be asked to hand over data without disclosing it to the public (this is a gag order). This is far from ideal. However, to make up for this fact, IPVanish implements an excellent zero-logs policy. This means that even if it was served a warrant it wouldn't have anything to hand over to the authorities.

Despite this seemingly watertight solution, the question surrounding gag orders is still significant. Due to the Snowden revelations, we know just how invasive the US is. This does make it a hard nation to trust with citizen's data. However, it is also true that many other nations also have similar gag/secrecy orders in place - so this is not a unique problem to the US.

It is our belief that for most people IPVanish is going to provide more than adequate levels of privacy. Anybody who requires higher levels of privacy would probably be better sticking to Tor (not a VPN).

Website Trackers

I checked the IPVanish website using Privacy Badger to see how much tracking it is doing. It detected 16 potential trackers, including Google analytics, spreedly, upsellit, hotjar, and doubleclick. This is nothing out of the ordinary and does not really pose any risks to the VPN service itself.

However, it is worth noting that there are VPNs out there that have as little as one tracker on their website, so 16 can be considered a high amount.

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Final thoughts

IPVanish is one of the best VPN services around and its prices are extremely reasonable. You get the choice of a massive number of server locations and a lot of advanced security features, such as a kill switch, DNS leak protection, and network blocking (to name a few). IPVanish has produced a superb app, which is easy to use and easy to set up. You don't need any special technical knowledge to use IPVanish VPN.

It is a shame that IPVanish has given up fighting to keep iPlayer available. However, unless this is a primary care - IPVanish is a superb, lightning fast VPN that is extremely secure. And it does unblock Netflix US, which is great! Its service offers outstanding privacy for P2P downloading, internet telephony apps, online gaming, and access to geo-restricted websites all over the world. Well worth a test run using its 30-day money back guarantee!

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