IPVanish Review & Coupon | Torrent Friendly

Who are they? Where are they from?

IPVanish’s words:

IPVanish was officially launched at the beginning of 2012.  The international team behind IPVanish, however, has been together for over 15 years and includes some of the absolute best networking and security minds in the world.  During that time, they’ve accomplished huge network, content delivery and security feats and have built and managed over 2,200 Gbps of average sustained traffic.

This is an extremely knowledgeable, high performance and passionate group that is today solely focused on delivering faster, more secure and more reliable VPN service than any other provider.  Sophisticated 3rd party testing shows also that IPVanish delivers the fastest VPN encryption throughput speeds (much faster in many cases) among all providers in the industry.

IPVanish’s mission is to protect individual’s right to online freedom and online anonymity by delivering the best VPN service in the world at the best price, period. We are US based.

Price / Packages

Package Configuration

Three pricing plans are currently offered and they all have the same features below.

• World’s fastest VPN network
• Torrent friendly with SOCKS5 proxy
• Hide behind 40,000+ shared IPs
• 1000+ servers in 60+ countries
• Zero logging of connections
• OpenVPN, PPTP and L2TP/IPsec protocols
• 10 simultaneous connections on multiple devices
• 24/7 Live Chat customer support
• 7-day Money Back Guarantee

Payment Options

As far as payment methods, PayPal, all major credit cards and World Pay (i.e iDeal, giropay, etc) are accepted. Bitcoin (Bitpay) support has been added as well.

• 1 Month: $10.00
• 3 Months: $26.99 – $8.99 per month
• 12 Months: $77.99 – $6.49 per month

Incognitoline offers you a 20% discount on any plan you choose. This effectively brings the pricing all the way down to $5.19/mo when you buy a year ($7.19 when you buy 3 months and $8 when you buy 1 month).

The Ordering Process

According to IPVanish:

To test their claim, we ordered a package with Paypal. In this case, they only asked to enter a username, password and email address. After submitting my info and making the payment, the VPN access details appeared in my inbox.

Software & Connectivity

IPVanish currently offers Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android clients. The VPN clients make it easy to connect since you don’t have to configure much. But the biggest advantage is that you can easily switch between servers.

Windows Client

The tested client v3.0.10 is stable and did not present any issues on Windows 10 x64. Once you open the client it will ask you for your login and password. The list of servers is presented in a clean and easy to use interface.

You can filter by city, country, protocol and latency. If you want to connect to a server in London, just type “london” to see all servers in London, instead of searching and scrolling through the list. All there is left to do is double clicking the location and confirming the connection.

If there are multiple servers available in a city, click the circle with a number inside it to expand and see all the individual servers with their load.  Once connected, it will show you the city, country and IP address. You can choose between OpenVPN (TCP), OpenVPN (UDP), L2TP & PPTP protocol.

You can check the connection log and your current IP address location on the map. There’s the option to automatically connect to the last used server, closest server by network latency or a server of your choice with the desired protocol when IPVanish starts. Right-clicking the taskbar icon will present you with “Disconnect”, “Connect”, “Status”, “Current IP”, “Change IP”, “Show Window” and “Exit”.

OS X Client

Not able to test due to unavailability of an OS X device. The software is streamlined across all platforms so it’s very similar to the Windows client.

Android App

The IPVanish Android app v3.0.13.987 has been tested on Android 6.0 without any issues. You can choose the OpenVPN TCP/UDP protocol. There is a “Scramble” option that adds obfuscation capability to OpenVPN, allowing it to bypass network traffic sensors which aim to detect usage of a VPN and block it. You can choose between port 443 and 1194, while also having the possibility to automatically change your IP address every 45, 60 or 90 minutes.

The server list can be sorted by country, city, server and ping. When connected, your current download/upload speed is shown in a graph, along with the server connection info. The speed is also shown in the notification bar.

iOS App

The IPVanish iOS app v3.0 has been tested on an iPhone 6 running iOS 10.1 without issues. You can choose between the IPSec and IKEv2 protocol. Everything else is pretty much identical to the Android app, except for the lack of OpenVPN. Due to the limited nature of iOS, there are fewer configuration options compared to Android.

Connectivity Options

They offer PPTP, L2TP, and OpenVPN. OpenVPN has UDP and TCP options on ports 443 and 1194 with the “Scramble” option. When using applications such as BitTorrent where many connections are made, OpenVPN UDP protocol is recommended. The TCP protocol has a connection limit so your VPN connection can be dropped when too many connections are made.

What’s even better for torrenting, is to use the included IPVanish SOCKS5 proxy. Since 10 simultaneous devices can be connected, they are definitely the industry leader in this field. We, therefore, could simultaneously connect an Android phone and a desktop computer without issues.

Speed

Our standard and most reliable testing methods that we found are by downloading from the nearest and fastest HTTP or FTP link for 60 seconds and measuring the average and max transfer rate. Upload and ping tests are performed by the closest beta.speedtest.net server, the most accurate HTML5 speed test thanks to 3000+ servers worldwide.

Speed Testing

The test is performed with a 300 / 30 Mbps cable connection in Amsterdam area. For the download speed test, a Ubuntu ISO is downloaded from the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Keep in mind that the max upload speed is only 30 Mbps so it does not mean the VPN can’t go faster.

Ping is performed on the server, University of Twente, The Netherlands.
Download link used: http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/os/linux/ubuntu-releases/16.10/ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso

Servers

40,000+ IPs on more than 1000+ servers in 60+ countries while new servers are added daily. At the time of writing the following server locations are available:

Server Locations

Reliability

The connections are made quickly and remain stable. Have not experienced a single connection drop. PPTP protocol connects the fastest but it is less secure and has a lower throughput. When you are logged in your IPVanish account and click on “server list”, you will get to see all the available servers and their status (server load).

Server list

Level of Privacy

IPVanish logging policy:

Besides not logging anything when using the VPN, IPVanish VPN has shared IP addresses, meaning there can literally be 20 people using 1 IP address (without compromising your own speed and security). A shared IP address makes it nearly impossible to single out any one person’s web activity.

IPv6, DNS and WebRTC IP Leak Test

We tested for IP leaks at https://ipleak.net. IPVanish did not leak your IP through WebRTC and IPv6. It also did not leak the DNS address of our ISP. This is consistent with company claims.

Support

IPVanish started a Live Chat Support Service since June 2 2018:

Their FAQ’s will answer most of your questions and the VPN Setup provides all the configuration steps you might need. The support forum can be of help as well.

With Live Chat, you get, of course, instant reply but we also contacted them by email and got a friendly and quick reply within 70 minutes.