IPVanish test and review
IPVanish is an American brand, offering its VPN services. During the eight years of its operation, the company has received many positive reviews and a dedicated community. Interestingly, when you decide to purchase a subscription, you will also receive 250 GB of space in the Internet cloud. How does IPVanish work in practice and is everything so pink?
Is IPVanish a safe service provider?
When choosing the right VPN subscription for you, you need to pay attention to the security features of its provider on its servers. This is crucial because only professional encryption standards can guarantee our security and full anonymity. Additionally, we should check if the service collects our logs. Fortunately, IPVanish is transparent and clear on this point, claiming that the company has a “Zero trafficlogs” policy, which means no logs or metadata to identify its users are collected and stored.
All data flowing through the IPVanish servers is encrypted with a 256-bit AES key. The network packet exchange protocols are protected by the SOCKS5 web proxy and the VPN tunnel itself is established via IKEv2, OpenVPN, L2TP/IPsec and PPTP, ensuring maximum available security. IPVanish offers more than 40,000 shared IP addresses, available at 1,400 VPN server locations in more than 75 countries, making it easy and enjoyable to create the desired geolocation.
Every user can use the VPN without limits. By subscribing, you also get access to an encrypted network cloud with 250 GB of data to use! This allows us to store sensitive data in a secure way and to have an always available backup source. At the same time, we can connect and use up to 10 devices.
What can we use IPVanish for?
Nowadays, VPNs are becoming a common and indispensable element in the lives of active Internet users. On the web we are able to do practically everything, because in everyday use we have e-shops, s-banking, s-offices and recently even online medical assistance.
Using mobile hotspots or insufficiently secured wi-fi networks, we are strongly exposed to hacker attacks. You can often encounter an entry from a user begging for help on the Internet, who suddenly discovered that someone hacked into his mailbox or stole valuable data from his cloud drive. Most frequently such situations are caused by a simple carelessness and a lack of awareness how to prevent such deceptive practices. It’s enough for a person to fall prey to a Man In The Middle attack or a sophisticated form of wi-fi sniffing, and then log on to their account on a site that doesn’t have HTTPS data encryption.
A skilled cybercriminal can provide unrestricted access to your data within minutes, and you’ll face unpleasant consequences.
In this case, all you have to do is use a VPN, which completely encrypts all network traffic. Then, even if someone manages to intercept your data packets, it would be completely useless for them and completely impossible to decrypt them. With a good quality VPN service, combined with incognito mode, you will also be able to protect yourself from pushy and unwanted cookies. This will make blocking ads a much easier task.
How much does IPVanish cost?
IPVanish is one of the more expensive VPN providers, but a trial version is available with a 30-day money back guarantee in case of dissatisfaction with the quality of service. The monthly subscription cost is USD 10 (about PLN 42). If you decide on a 3-month service variant, you will have to pay USD 8.99 (less than PLN 38) for it, and the annual subscription will cost you USD 6.49 per month (about PLN 27). All of the above packages automatically give us access to 250 GB of data space, stored in an encrypted cloud. This makes it easier for us to comfortably hold our valuable files and backups.
Does IPVanish allow you to watch Netflix?
Unfortunately, network streaming service algorithms can recognize an attempt to connect to them via VPN. IPVanish is transparent here and informs its clients directly about it, recommending the use of the splitting option, which allows you to connect to Netflix normally, even during an active VPN tunnel. For those who are a little less familiar with this issue, IPVanish provides a comprehensive guide on this subject on its website, which you can read here.
We strongly recommend this approach!
What speeds can we count on when using IPVanish services?
To check the real speed of the Internet, we first took a measurement without IPVanish VPN enabled. The results we obtained, were 154 Mbps download speed and 156 Mbps upload speed.
IPVanish automatically suggested connecting to a Polish server. The obtained speeds were as follows: 69 Mbps download speed, 65 Mbps upload speed and 26 ms ping speed. We won’t hide, in this test the service tested was extremely poor. Other top VPNs recorded a few percent decrease in data transfer speed, while IPVanish lost about 55% of its speed.
How did the VPN handle the foreign connection? After selecting an American server and testing, the results were one of the worst we recorded so far. Download speed was only 19 Mbps and upload speed was less than 22 Mbps at 141 millisecond ping. What’s even worse, IPVanish automatically disconnected after a few minutes… Such speeds make it impossible to use the Internet smoothly and even watching YouTube, can cause us a lot of problems and causes us to be nervous.
Then we decided to test the connection with British servers. Here it was definitely better and surprisingly – faster than in the case of the Polish server! Download speed was 78 Mbps, upload speed was 56 Mbps and ping speed was 38 ms.
Another task for IPVanish, was to check the quality of connection to the German server. The location in Germany gave the best results so far. The download speed was 136 Mbps, the upload speed was 69 Mbps and the ping was 30 ms.
Connection quality with IPVanish is poor and speeds aren’t very repeatable. The most reprehensible was spontaneous connection breakage. Admittedly, the application has a killswitch function, but if you want to leave your computer on overnight to download files, and after just an hour the connection will be broken, in the morning you’re unlikely to be satisfied with such a turn of events… It’s hard to predict what the reason is, but we honestly share our experience with you.
The clumsy IPVanish application
Unfortunately, the use of IPVanish on Windows isn’t the most enjoyable. The application has an archaic look, isn’t very intuitive and unreadable. To select a server in a given country, you have to go through a long list of items, and the application itself can hang even on modern hardware.
Summary
IPVanish is definitely not worth its exorbitant price. Competitive VPNs beat him on the head, in terms of functionality, and are very often cheaper than him. In the course of the tests, IPVanish has performed very mediocre. However, it’s worthwhile for you to test the performance of this VPN yourself by taking advantage of the trial period option, which gives you a 30 day money back guarantee.
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