Vrois Review

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Features

With Vrois being a relatively new VPN service, it isn't easy finding much information on the parent company. Vrois is based in Lake Esinore, California. A VPN provider with headquarters in the US is not ideal for many reasons. I'll touch on this later on in the review.

Vrois advertises 25 servers for the Connect plan and 50 if you subscribe to the Pro plan. Interestingly enough, I could only access 22 servers in 20 countries with my Pro plan. It remains to be seen whether this is false advertising or an innocent error on the VPN's part.

Some of the server locations include Hong Kong, Singapore, and Washington DC.

Vrois currently only offers a dedicated client for Android users. It does state that Windows, Mac, and iOS clients are in development. However, the VPN is currently available on some other platforms thanks to the compatibility of the OpenVPN protocol. The only trick to getting Vrois working on these platforms is getting all the server files into the right place.

The Vrois app on the Google Play Store has over 3,000 downloads, with a 4/5 star average.

As I mentioned earlier, Vrois Connect subscribers can have up to five devices simultaneously connected to the VPN. Vrois Pro users get a highly impressive eight devices. The high number of simultaneous connections make Vrois a good option for an entire family or household.

Vrois also claims to include a port forwarding feature with the VPN. Unfortunately, I found no evidence of such a feature. Very confusing!

Speed and Performance

The speed of a VPN is always going to be important, especially when streaming high-quality video. I checked US Netflix and BBC iPlayer (UK) and was able to effortlessly stream video when connected to Vrois. That being said, I was still curious to see how the VPN performed using the OpenVPN protocol (as some speed loss is expected).

The graphs show the highest, lowest, and average speeds for each server and location. See our full speed test explanation for more detail.

As you can see, while my speed test results weren't too shabby, there was a significant drop-off when testing upload and download speeds of the UK server (London 1). My US speed results were pretty decent, and a quick test of streaming HD video came back without any issues.

Price

Vrois subscribers have two plans to choose from: "Connect" and "Pro." These plans start at $5.99 and $9.99 a month respectively. The differences between the two are more simultaneous connections (five and eight) and more server locations to choose from (25 and 50). I have to add that I didn't notice more servers being available, even though I did sign up for the Pro plan.

As is the norm in the industry, Vrois offers substantial savings and discounts depending on the term of your plan. Semi-annual subscribers get 20% off, while annual subscribers see a 35% monthly discount.

Vrois accepts Paypal, all major credit cards, and bitcoin as payment methods. Payment processing is handled through Stripe. I was happy to see bitcoin as a payment option, as this can substantially increase your online anonymity.

Vrois plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee. You will need to write a cancellation email to Vrois to claim a refund.

Customer Service

Vrois offers users ticket-based and telephone support (toll-free 1-888 number), along with a live chat service powered by Zendesk. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to try out the live chat and just got an error message each time I tried to start a session.

While Vrois advertises an "advanced support ticket system," I didn't see much to back this claim up. All things considered, yet another reason to second guess signing up to Vrois.

Vrois encourages users to interact with its social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus). Upon further investigation, however, I found these social media accounts only average about one monthly post and have less than 30 followers combined!

Privacy and Security

As far as encryption goes, Vrois ticks all the right boxes, with AES-256 encryption bundled with an RSA-2048 handshake and HMAC SHA-384 authentication (that is, very strong encryption - please see here for an explanation of these terms). I was also happy to see that perfect forward secrecy is provided by a Diffie-Hellman Exchange.

Unfortunately, Vrois is based in the US, which is one of the worst countries for digital privacy. The US government and various alphabet agencies (the NSA and the like) are known for forcing tech companies (a recent example being Apple) to hand over data on users.

Vrois claims a strict no logging policy on its website. While advertising this policy is a nice gesture, the reality is that Vrois (as a US VPN provider) cannot guarantee complete user privacy. There is even a mention of full cooperation with government and law enforcement in the Vrois privacy policy - yikes!

Torrenting and other Peer to Peer (P2P) activity is allowed on Vrois servers, but I would recommend looking for an alternative torrenting VPN if you are looking for real privacy.

Final Thoughts

I liked:

• Bitcoin payment accepted
• Up to eight simultaneous connections
• Good encryption
• Netflix and iPlayer work

I wasn’t so sure about:

• Poor performance on UK servers
• Support system

I hated:

• No desktop software

There were a lot of head-scratching moments while conducting this review. Questionable customer service doesn't exactly inspire confidence, and the absence of desktop software isn't great news for those without prior VPN experience. I was also shocked to see a blatant copy of the ProPrivacy.com Beginner's Guide on the Vrois blog.

The other big issue with the service of Vrois is its being headquartered in the US, which is a big negative from a privacy standpoint. Those looking to keep private information safe from snooping governments are better served looking elsewhere.

That said, Vrois is a relatively young VPN (less than a year), so there is plenty of time to correct some of the issues I've found in this review. Leave any comments or questions you might have below!

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