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IPVanish Review

This IPVanish review takes a look at the VPN service, which claims to be the world’s best. The service comes with a ton of endorsements and is feature-rich, but to claim you are the world’s best does take some backing up.

We will dig a little deeper and answer the question, is IPVanish good, or is it all marketing hype?

Currently, IPVanish is one of the major players in the VPN world, but, if it can deliver all it promises and is more than another run of the mill VPN services remains to be seen.

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Pros

  • Good speeds and reliability
  • Large selection of app support
  • Split-tunneling support
  • Good privacy features, encryption, and no leaks
  • 24/7 chat and email customer support. Telephone support US-based
  • Self-owned server network. Includes secure DNS service

Cons

  • US Based (5-eyes)
  • Apps awkward to use
  • Some server locations may be in areas different to advertised
  • Doesn’t support Bitcoin (Here are our top Bitcoin VPN picks)

Plans and Pricing

IPVanish is one of the few companies which own all their servers and equipment. This means they don’t use third parties, so with this in mind, the prices they offer are pretty reasonable.

IPVanish offers one package with variable rates depending on the length of time you sign up for. This is becoming standard practice among VPN providers, so it is nothing unusual.

Here are their current rates:

  • 12-Month Plan: $6.49 per month
  • 3 Monthly Plan: $8.99 per month
  • Monthly Plan: $10.00 per month

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There are a few payment options, but Bitcoin or other cryptos are not on the list. Accepted methods of payment are as follows. The company used to offer Bitcoin, but they have since withdrawn this payment method.

Credit Card – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Visa Electron, Delta and JCB.

The other payment option is PayPal.

With any of the options you choose, there is a 7-day money-back guarantee that is enough time to check out the service.

When checking through their terms and conditions, this isn’t as clear as it makes out. If the VPN is purchased through the Apple Store, then any refund needs to come from Apple and not from IPVanish themselves.


Key Features

Privacy

IPVanish uses the top-rated OpenVPN as its default protocol along with AES 256-bit encryption. This falls in line with other top tier providers, and this is considered military-grade security.

While checking settings before testing, the following were all enabled, so there were no hidden secrets.

  1. Kill Switch – A kill switch blocks all traffic if you encounter a VPN connection drop.
  2. DNS leak protection – All DNS queries are performed by IPVanish and not third-party servers, and DNS leak protection is enabled by default.
  3. IPv6 leak protection – Ipv6 is blocked to make sure your real IPv6 IP address isn’t leaked while connected.

Once we gathered the results, IPVanish does deliver on their claim of no leaks of any kind. All security and privacy tests were passed with no errors or problems.

Logging

IPVanish has a strict logging policy, but potential users might have heard of an incident that happened back in 2016.

At this time, the company was owned by another owner. HighWinds Network Group did hand over user data.

Not long after this, the company changed hands and is now owned by StackPath, who have so far upheld the zero-logging policy.

Reading their terms, they state they don’t retain connection records, traffic, or activity data. The only things they do keep are an email address and payment information.

Ease of Use

The ease of use is around average. Things are more complicated than they need to be, but there are ways of using the client apps that are better implementations than some other VPN’s, this being said, these are not presented by default, and you do need to bypass the awkward parts first.

Supported Devices

IPVanish now allows 10 devices to connect simultaneously. This was doubled from the 5 available in 2018.

Apps

IPVanish is compatible with a vast number of platforms and OS. It comes with dedicated apps for Windows, Mac OS, Android, and iOS.

Other devices can be manually set-up, such as Ubuntu (Linux) Chromebook and routers.

Other devices to note is it is popular with Kodi users and based on Android devices like Amazon Fire TV, but these don’t come with access to the Play store. The IPVanish app APK can be downloaded directly to the device/

Sign-Up

Signing up is straightforward, and all you need to do is hit the Orange ‘Start Now’ button that takes you to the sales page. Choose your package, and then enter a valid email address, and password.

After this, you select your payment option and hit the green button to pay.

You then receive an activation email sent to the email you gave. This contains the activation link that needs to be clicked to agree to their terms of service and activate the account

Setup

While not needing to log into IPVanish to download the clients, they are easy to find on the website, but it would be useful to have access made easier.

Once installed, the apps look a little different from many other VPNs that offer the large connect, disconnect button, and a server location you can change. This is the norm, but IPVanish looks more complicated.

The window client, for example, wastes space with warning messages. It then hides your country to connect in a drop-down list, which takes an additional click to view. After this, things pick up a bit, but it is far from ideal.

Switching servers is also a bit of a chore, but they do make some decent efforts with their server map.

Advanced Features

IPVanish VPN doesn’t come with many standout features, but what it does do, it does quite well. One of the best features they have is the SOCKS5 Web Proxy. This allows users to have VPN benefits without installing any software.

This enables the hiding of IP addresses with better performance. The downside of this it does nothing for your security.

If torrenting, then you are as visible as you are without a VPN. This Web Proxy may be the reason there are no browser extensions available.

IPVanish is also compatible with TOR so that you can use this for an even more secure VPN connection, but you will have a sever speed hit.

Browser Extensions

One of the biggest letdowns of IPVanish is that they don’t have any browser extensions. They even go as far as to release an article on their blog openly promoting secure browsers.

Although they do nothing for overall system protection, it is handy to have a VPN service that delivers an extension for browsers.


Performance

Speed Test

When running the speed tests, it was found that IPVanish was pretty quick, and a lot faster than most of the competition.

Download speeds were around 20% less than without using the VPN, but this will depend on where you are connecting from, and where you are connecting to.

It appears long-distance connections do drop off somewhat, and the final numbers are much higher than this 20% drop-off.

What is strange is the US server speeds are slower than the EU based ones. Considering the company is US-based, you would expect it to be the other way around.

For a company that covers 60 countries with over 1,200 VPN servers, you would expect better performance, even if it was only in the USA where they are based.

Customer Service

Things have changed, and now customer support isn’t as bad as it used to be. It is evident, the company has taken note, and this is one area they have approved. When users want
assistance, they can now either use:

  • New 24/7 live chat support
  • 24/7 email support
  • Telephone support, but this is US based and follows certain hours of availability.

Nowadays, the support is far more responsive, and there is a wealth of guides and info on their website inside the knowledge base.

Netflix

Netflix is a mixed bag. Out of several attempts from varying servers, it was possible to connect once.

Many other IPVanish VPN review replies are that it doesn’t work, and with one success out of so many attempts, it is fair to say Netflix can’t be accessed reliably enough. (Here’s our Netflix region change guide)

Torrenting

Torrenting is allowed on every IPVanish VPN server, and this comes with no restrictions or bandwidth usage.


Wrap Up

To sum everything up, IPVanish delivers very reliable service at a decent enough price. As we saw, there are no real outstanding features, but it does provide reliable features.

But, it isn’t so much about what IPVanish does or doesn’t do; it is the standard of their competition.

When you can get long-distance connections speeds that are faster, and with reliable Netflix, then this changes things dramatically.

Additionally, when you look at other VPN’s, you are getting much more for your money.

Like we say, IPVanish is far from being bad, it is that there are others who are better.

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Streamr Go

StreamrGo is always about privacy, specifically protecting your privacy online by increasing security and better standard privacy practices.