Introduction Viatun

PureVPN has been providing VPN services because 2007, so It is not surprising that it now claims a long list of attributes: 2,000+ self-managed servers across 180+ locations, a broad choice of protocols, torrent service, DNS and IPv6 leak security, a smart kill switch, five apparatus enabled and payment via Bitcoin should you need it. Viatun

Unusual Extras comprise’split tunneling’ (you choose which traffic goes via the VPN, and which uses your ISP) and also the ability to create an instant Wi-Fi VPN hotspot on your laptop, and connect even more devices through that.

The Company provides dedicated apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux, extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and much more downloads and tutorials that will help you set this up on routers, Kodi, Android TV, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick and much more.

Click here to sign up for PureVPN.

PureVPN PureVPN subscription choices:

• 12 month plan – $5.75 a month ($69 total cost)

The Monthly plan is typical value at $11 (#8.40), however, the annual program is only a monthly $2.99 (#2.30), a really good thing.

This Drops into a monthly $1.32 (#1) should you cover 5 decades upfront, a total of 79 (#61). We would not normally recommend registering for that long, but the price is so low, you may think that it’s worthwhile. Private online Access delivers a decent two-year plan for $2.91 (#2.24) a month, for instance, but that is still $70 (#54) in complete, less. If you use PureVPN for two or three years, you’re getting value.

The By employing some marketing trickery, company spoils this belief a little. Each program has a’past sold’ indicator that informs you when a person last signed up, and it.

This is Intended to explain to you how popular the service is, but we are not certain the figures are real. We refreshed the page several times, and seen in different browsers, and also the’sold’ figures varied widely. They act like they’re chosen randomly, rather than corresponding to any real world events.

PureVPN does not advertise a trial on the website. We dug deep and found a page for something known as a’3-day trial accounts’, but that is a little misleading. It is really just a commercial program in which you pay a non-refundable $2.50 (#2) for 3 days of support.

A guarantee is for your Industrial plans, which is more generous than most. PureVPN’s refund policy used to incorporate some sneaky circumstances where you wouldn’t get back your money if you’d connected more than a hundred occasions, or used more than 3GB of data transport, but we were happy to observe these happen to be dropped. It is now advertised as a’no questions asked, secure, stress-free’ money-back guarantee, so if you are unhappy, just send an email and ask for a refund. Viatun

Apps

Handing Over your money to PureVPN is remarkably easy, since the company supports just about every payment format there is: credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies (via CoinPayments), AliPay, assorted gift cards, and more than 150 other payment methods via the Paymentwall platform.

After Parting with your cash, download links direct you to programs for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, the browser extensions and more. We grabbed the Windows client, also there arrived a welcome email with login details, as it was downloading.

Setup Was easy, and following a quick launch, the Windows customer prompted us to select one of five modes: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, File Sharing and Dedicated IP. We suspect most folks will wonder whether to choose Internet Freedom or Security/Privacy, and there’s no advice.

The Support website told us that choosing a mode would optimize PureVPN’s preferences for this undertaking. File Sharing manners and the Streaming would optimize for speed, although choosing Security/Privacy would prioritize security above all else.

VPN Beginners might appreciate this approach as it means that they don’t have to understand and tweak the underlying settings. But experts are likely to approve, since there’s no clear indication of what each mode does. There’s nothing wrong with task-based mode selection, but we’d like a clear display of those low-level settings for each style, so that experienced users may understand the effects of their selection.

After Selecting a style, you’re in a position to select locations. This has plenty of functionality, allowing you to navigate locations by cities or countries, search by title, see ping times, or make favorites for quick recall afterwards.

Alternatively, Choosing a Purpose choice displays a list of tasks you may want to execute — unblocking Netflix or other streaming sites, using VoIP, obtaining social media websites or anything — and you can in theory select among these, and permit PureVPN to select a server for you.

Connect To a host and the client displays your connection status. There’s also an optional bandwidth chart showing your data transfers. You certainly won’t need it, but it is excellent to see PureVPN making the effort.

The Client makes smart of use of notifications to make sure that you know what is happening. Choose a location as long as your Windows client is the foreground application, it won’t waste your time together with desktop notifications. But if you change to the client notices a different application, and a pop-up window seems to allow you to know when it disconnects and connects.

A bonus Gravity characteristic blocks access to known sites. We’d always prefer to buy this kind of feature from a specialist security firm, however, Gravity is far smarter than the majority of the VPN-related competition. As well as blocking harmful links, it can turn on Safe Search for the main search engines, block entire categories of website, whitelist websites you always want to get into, and blacklist websites you don’t. Oh, and advertisements can be blocked by it , too. Viatun

The Settings Box is a highlight, particularly for experienced users, since it’s absolutely filled with extras.

The Client doesn’t just have choices to start on system start and auto-connect, for instance. As soon as you’re protected it can open your default browser.

Need a Different protocol? PureVPN Permits You to Pick from OpenVPN TCP/UDP, PPTP, L2TP, SSTP and IKEV. There’s also an automated alternative that the client suggests offers the very best speed and security, but from what we could see, that is not true: it only cycles through another protocols till it finds one that works.

Split Tunneling allows you to send the traffic of apps that are specified through your VPN. That requires more time to set up, and you have to be quite certain which apps you want to redirect, but it may additionally optimize performance by limiting your data transfer requirements.

The VPN Hotspot is an unusual additional, configuring a hotspot which turns the host computer to a limited VPN router. When it is enabled, you will be able to use your telephone, tablet computer or other devices to get online via the host’s PureVPN connection.

Along with the List continues, with IPv6 leak security, an unusually configurable kill switch, along with a multi-port option which chooses the very best port, preventing any closed or throttled options. You can opt to use a non-NAT network to acquire a unique IP address, port forwarding is available if you require this, and a Support section does not simply link to the site: it facilitates creating a service ticket from within the customer.

Although There is plenty of power , the interface is a clumsy and inconsistent mess. You will find normal buttons, radio buttons, links, icons and sidebars, they do not always work as you would expect, and even though we figured out how to navigate around the system, it never felt comfortable or natural.

Still, The customer did a good job for us, blocking DNS and WebRTC leaks, together with the kill button successfully murdering our net access if the VPN connection fell. It might appeal if you will use some of their customer’s many added features.

We took a Look at PureVPN’s Android app, and it had been much the exact same story as the Windows version. After choosing a’Mode’ (not certain why)we managed to select countries, cities, or choose a Purpose (optimized for China, unblock this or that streaming assistance, etc ). It’s more awkward to use than the VPN app, but you will find it out easily enough.

What is More interesting is that the Android app does not drop the majority of the desktop’s settings and options, which is exactly what we normally see. It’s a very similar feature set, such as a selection of protocol (OpenVPN TCP/UDP or IKEv2), a kill button, split tunneling, port forwarding, Gravity URL filtering, and much more. If you’ll utilize all that functionality or some, it’s worth a go. Viatun

Privacy and logging

In a Inspection we pointed out that PureVPN created a big deal of its’zero log’ policy, explaining that this meant the company didn’t record what you did on the internet. Nevertheless, the small print said there was some session logging, which seemed to add the time you connect to a host, your incoming IP address and the entire bandwidth utilized.

This Is not a minor detail. In October 2017 reports appeared of a man being detained on suspicion of running”an extensive cyberstalking effort”, in part based on PureVPN records demonstrating that its services were accessed from appearing IPs including the accused man’s home and office. The’zero log’ VPN retained some sort of logs, after all, and these were able to assist connect internet activities to a specific account.

PureVPN sort of responded to the Post, where the firm pointed out that it didn’t keep full logs, such as your surfing history, and it hadn’t done anything to violate its privacy policy, where the session logging was cited.

This Doesn’t tackle the issue of why the company described itself as maintaining’zero logs’ in the primary part of the website, however, when this turned out not to be entirely true. That is also not a trivial point. Logging policies are based almost entirely on trust, and a VPN isn’t likely to be reliable if it’s seen to mislead users or bury the fact of a scenario from the small print.

PureVPN has at least updated its privacy Policy, which currently includes probably the most explicit no-logging sentence we have ever seen:’we don’t retain any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, documents of this VPN IPs assigned to youpersonally, your original IPs, your relationship time, the background of your browsing, the websites you visited, your incoming traffic, the information or information you’ve accessed, or the DNS queries generated by you personally.’

The Policy also explains the minimum link data it does record –‘We all know the day you connected to some specific VPN place and from which Internet Service Provider’ — also covers plenty of other important issues in a clear and readable manner.

The Fantastic news, then, is that PureVPN’s current Privacy policy looks good and says all the right things. It’s much better than the majority of the contest. But the catch is that the logging narrative will understandably lead some folks to wonder whether they can trust what the company says. We can not tell you exactly what to believe, but it’s well worth checking out equally PureVPN’s original site defense and also its present privacy policy before you make up your mind.

Click here to subscribe to PureVPN.

Netflix

PureVPN Makes more of an attempt to support website unblocking than most of the contest. The company does not just make airy promises on the site then forget about these afterwards, it includes specific support for streaming inside its programs, in theory allowing you to get Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer and a host of other services from wherever you are in the world. Viatun

We Double-clicked that the BBC option, and viewed as the client connected and exhibited a’err-network-changed’ message. What? This seemed like a serious problem, however, the browser had only discovered the shift in our community settings as the customer connected, and after this was complete, the BBC iPlayer website opened and opened content as usual.

It was Much the same story with Netflix. The customer started our browser until the connection was complete, thus we saw the same error message, but this disappeared automatically, and we were free to browse and stream whatever Netflix articles we enjoyed.

You’re Not limited to the professional services built to PureVPN’s programs , naturally. YouTube wasn’t contained on the list, for example, but connecting to a US server got us .

Performance

Our Normal performance tests involve running custom software which connects checking much more , ping time, location and speeds. Regrettably, we couldn’t get this working with PureVPN, or determine why (whether that’s our fault or theirs, we can’t be convinced ).

But An warning in the print clarifies that users aren’t allowed to have over 200 sessions every day if we did. That won’t concern most folks, but it does become a problem when you are running VPN benchmarks across a number of servers. Viatun

We dropped Back on our older manual way of connecting via customers and assessing the results from several speed checking websites, such as SpeedTest.net, Fast.com and TestMy.net. This will not provide us as much information to use, but there’s still enough to get a sense for what the service can provide.

Our neighborhood UK servers varied but nevertheless gave quite acceptable download rates of connection that was 75Mbps to us.

Near Speeds were mildly below average. Here they have been typically 35-45Mbps, although netherlands connections can often deliver substantially the same speeds for us as UK servers.

US Performance ranged from around 30Mbps to 50Mbps. That’s far from the fastest we’ve seen, but unless you’re planning 24 hours of intensive torrenting, it’s most likely not going to cause you any issues.

As usual, Speeds tailed off drastically for the more distant or less common locations. For example, New Zealand averaged 12Mbps, Vietnam was 10Mbps, 1Mbps was reached by Taiwan, and China ranged down to such a slow speed the net benchmarking sites often stalled mid-test. That places the magnitude of PureVPN’s system into perspective (having heaps of servers doesn’t matter whether many are unusably slow), but if you are only planning to use the major locations, it won’t matter very much.

On a few Occasions, our PureVPN Windows customer wasn’t able to connect to our test server that is chosen. The Cancel button did not work, but the problem here is that the connection didn’t time out for several moments, although that is not uncommon.

Everything You Want To Know About PureVPN

The Evaluation of Speed — Just How Fast is PureVPN?

Let’s start off by making something clear, i.e. whatever VPN service you use, the internet speed is going to take a hit. That hit is a result. The huge majority of VPN services make every possible attempt to ensure that the hit is as mild as it could be. So, unlike what many folks are going to have you think like using dial-up, that it’s not going to be.

PureVPN, compared to other similar VPN services, happens to be much quicker. Thus, yes it does live up to the promise of being the quickest in the industry. Viatun

The way we tested the operation was by using Ookala’s nifty speed testing website and app. We then ran the speed test on both national and global servers. Then we compared the results and that is the way we discovered PureVPN to be faster.

PureVPN includes a domestic latency of a mere 6.7% percent. During our tests that were downloading, as a matter of fact, PureVPN improved rates substantially that by our calculations is an percent. We discovered that competing VPN services were substantially slower. Some individuals guess were throttling download speeds because they didn’t wish to worry their servers .

When it comes to uploads, PureVPN did not really boost it did with downloads, but it took a mere 4.5% percent hit. If anything this is among the upload scores we’ve seen from a VPN provider.

Throughout our international speed tests, the latency increased by 200%. Though download speeds have been still a whopping 403.8percent better than any of the competing products I tested it against. The uploads were 22.7% percentage slower which is second best when compared to perhaps Hotspot Shield which enhanced the upload speed by 1.4% percent.

A Mind-Blowing Number of Servers

The map on the left allows you bypass the software’s default recommendation and decide on a server for yourself. Remember that by default PureVPN selects the server which is frequently the nearest one. When in China I noticed that it kept picking up servers in Hong Kong by default which is not the simple fact but also nearby that Hong Kong’s cyberspace is not as rigorously censored as China.

PureVPN has over 2000 servers that are spread across 140 countries and 180 areas around the globe. Servers are located in Asia, Central America, South America, North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. You might think that PureVPN only has servers in nations which perhaps don’t censor or block sites, but you would be wrong. Servers in Russia, Turkey, and China are there in case they were needed by you.

It Does Not Slow Down Your Internet

Over time VPN providers, generally speaking, have received bad press for notoriously slowing down net speeds that consumers have never been pleased with clearly. There are many VPN providers that slow down what may be slow internet. Luckily, with PureVPN that’s not true even if you use it to stream Netflix, YouTube, etc..

Along with not slowing down your net, PureVPN supplies a number of other attributes like robust servers which are located around the globe and which scored exceptionally during our rate tests. Then there’s also the fact that they utilize encryption, together with programs for Android and iOS devices. Even though there are more reasons to think about PureVPN as we will analyze in detail below. Viatun

Excellent Set of Features and Easy to Understand

I have used dozens of VPN programs over the years, and PureVPN is like a breath of fresh air. It is easy to use and compared to the previous time that I used the program its now geared towards individuals that are new to using VPNs. As soon as PureVPN loads you’re prompted to choose from five choices, i.e. Safety, Internet Freedom, Stream, Remote/Dedi IP (this feature gives you a dedicated IP) and Document Sharing. An experience that’s based on the option chosen is then delivered by the program.

Another thing I like about PureVPN is that every one of the features are to the stage. For example, their Web Freedom feature enables you to select what region you want to access Netflix from, such as from the UK, Australia, etc.. Where it’s otherwise blocked you can also access Netflix.

Compared to the last time I used PureVPN this time around it sensed zippier. The interface has been glowing, with vibrant pictures some of that may be difficult to read on a screen. When you are connected to a private server, you’ll observe the IP address, link status, and the duration of your session.

The traffic chart gives you a fantastic feel for just how much bandwidth has been consumed, which is beneficial for anybody on a metered internet connection. But it’s very important to mention here for all those worrying about data caps that PureVPN doesn’t have any. You’re only limited to what the ISP has in store for you!

Like many other competing VPN services, you pick the server and the country it is based in. You can search for servers and click on them to link. Some servers based on which you are found are currently going to be faster than others because of reduced latency.

You can also select which protocols to use. Pick between OpenVPN, IKEv2, SSTP, PPTP, and L2TP. Then there is PureVPN’s very own stealth protocol that according to the provider ensures the anonymity. Since folks like me have PureVPN makes it easy by providing a speed and safety rating for each. The key point to notice here is because the safety boosts the speed slows down. You’ll need to strike a compromise between the two depending on what’s needed. By default, the software selects a protocol it believes best for you. Most people who do not work for the CIA (pun intended) will be fine with the default option. Viatun

Hands-on and First Impressions

We’ve admittedly used PureVPN before, but after a hiatus or perhaps two years we pretty much forgot how things worked. As soon as you’ve chose to subscribe and download their applications, you’ll have to enter your email and choose a password. Interestingly and perhaps confusingly, this isn’t what you will use to the software to log-in, but it’s used for charging purposes.

Once subscribers have paid, they get an email with the username and password in plain text. We’ve utilized other VPNs that use the exact same method to payment identities that were separate from user identities that ensures anonymity that was better. Yet we believe it may be perplexing to first-time customers however its something you get used to. Additionally, in our experience the email tends to property for some reason, so make sure before calling service to check that also.

Support

PureVPN has a large support Website with a massive number of troubleshooting guides and tutorials. The opening page points you Setup Guide, Troubleshoot, For Users in China and to watch most of these segments, and Netflix US, for instance include more information than you’d anticipate.

The Installation Guide has subsections for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Smart TV, Routers and Other Devices, as an example, as well as some of those segments have more content than the entire support website of lesser VPNs.

We’re, although it’s an impressive amount of work Unsure how successful and reliable it might be. We assessed the guide OpenVPN setup guide, for example, and found it failed entirely. OpenVPN was not installed correctly, there were no PureVPN configuration files, and there was no troubleshooting information from the manual to help us figure out that.

If the Website can not help, you can send an email or increase a support ticket from inside the client. We took the service and the ticket path done very well, with the support team sending us a useful and friendly response to our test question in just more than an hour.

Alternatively, Chat can be used by you . We found it could take a minute or two to receive a response, and even then, the broker did not provide us the level of help since we had obtained to our email query. PureVPN could not get near the level of chat support we’d received from leading competitors like ExpressVPN, afterward, but we are still glad the option is available. And with speedy support to hand, any live chat problems you may have are not too important. Viatun

Final verdict

PureVPN Comes bundled with a pile of features, which can be surprising looking at the purchase price. These do not always work as you may anticipate and there are lots of usability issues with the programs — but demanding users who’ll utilize this level of VPN power should give PureVPN an appearance.

Click here to subscribe to PureVPN.