In this modern age, admit it or not, we spend too much time online. While it guarantees improved convenience as well as greater connectedness, please note that the internet becomes one of the flashpoints of cyber risks and crimes threatening both our security and privacy.

Luckily, more and more security tools come into existence that can keep us protected while using the internet and one of the best options you can consider are VPNs. As this tool becomes so popular, more and more VPN reviews exist online. But we would like to inform you that not all of them can be trusted. This means some are relevant others aren’t.

However, with our VPN reviews, we can assure you that you will get honest reviews only. After all, our main goal is to help you to choose the best VPN that satisfy your needs. Believe it or not, we invest most of our time reviewing just to make sure we can help you.

Why Do We Review VPNs?

Perhaps you are wondering why we review VPNs. One of the main reasons why we do this is to help you get a clearer idea of the security before investing in it. You can always depend on our VPN reviews and make your mind clear and decide whether the service is worth the money or not.

Further, when we leave reviews for certain VPNs, it gives us satisfaction as we help not only ourselves but others as well understanding what they can expect from them, how they are performing, flaws, benefits, and much more.

Believe it or not, we review all VPNs we come across. After all, our job is to give unbiased reviews. Please note that we do not come up with reviews based on what we hear, actually, we  test and evaluate them personally because we don’t want to make false claims. We want everything we publish to be accurate.

How Many VPNs Have Been Tested And Reviewed?

Since the beginning and up till now, we have reviewed and tested over 50 services. Usually, every review comes with the analysis of VPN together with a deeper look at the features. Of course, we also include the advantages and disadvantages.

Nevertheless, here are some of the factors that we take into account when reviewing and testing VPNs.

1. Privacy

For every review, we start by visiting the website of the VPN service and reading through their logging documents and privacy policy.

Actually, almost all VPNs maintain a certain amount of information. Some data is completely acceptable such as the total number of users connected to the server and the amount of data being transferred in one day. As we test and review the product, we often notice that other logs aren’t harmless. When we find out that the VPN is logging the IP address, we note it right away so that we’ll be able to include it in the review. However, it is not too obvious at all times.

Some privacy policies can be so dense and confusing, as they usually use legal and deeper terms. But there are terms that are too short leaving more confusion. To solve this problem, we conduct a deeper review of the VPN’s ownership and history, where it’s based and who the owner is: Can these persons be trusted with confidential data? Since our goal is to offer unbiased and accurate VPN reviews, if we are not happy and content with the answers to such questions, the VPN will receive a very poor score.

2. Security, Features, and Encryption

The main jobs of VPN services is to keep you anonymous and safe. Having said that, we actually spent more attention on this factor when writing reviews.

The protocol selection is the first factor we usually audit. We also check the encryption standard. Unlike the AES-128, the AES-256 is more secure and commonplace. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the first option can’t be trusted. What’s more, to make sure that a certain VPN works properly and doesn’t have any leaks, our review team runs IPv4, HTML5 geolocation, DNS, and WebRTC.

We count each VPN server together with the number of individual cities and countries in which are located. We use these numbers as well as the evenness of the VPNs’ global spread to determine the rating of the server locations. In addition to that, we try out an additional platform on each platform. While the kill switch is the most crucial, keep in mind that you use other popular options such as split tunneling, ad blockers, and obfuscation.

In this category, we also take into account the capability to bypass censorship. As a matter of fact, evading censorship isn’t a must-have feature, instead, it’s a bonus. However, it is very notable if a certain VPN can manage it.

3. Speed

Regardless of how speedy it is, using a VPN might reduce your loading and browsing speed. We would like to inform you that speed alone does not earn a recommendation, however, for most users, it is one of the most important factors that must be considered when choosing a VPN service. This means it is a common part of a VPN analysis. When it comes to assessing speed, one of our techniques includes some critical questions such as the following:

Does the VPN restrict the number of times you’re able to switch servers?

Does it throttle the speed intentionally?

And

Does the VPN affect your usage or data?

The above-mentioned practices may slow you down. So, if the answer to all of these questions is “YES”, automatically, it will get a very low score from us. It is because the right answer to such questions is “NO”.

A properly-maintained and wide network of servers will speed up your internet. With that in mind, we keep an eye on how many servers the service provider has, the location and the hardware being used. One more thing, we also keep track of the total number of IP addresses a certain VPN has to offer and if they give dedicated IP addresses.

As of this moment, speed test is manually performed using the OpenVPN protocol. This is because it is known as the most widely used and most secure kind of open-source protocol. After testing the internet speed without the VPN, we then connect the devices to the VPN and select at least five servers in different locations. We test these servers, usually 5 times each, with more than three days intervals.

4. Streaming

There is nothing more difficult than how we assess and test each VPN for streaming. In order to offer you accurate and factual VPN reviews we subscribe to all the streaming platforms we can and assess which VPN server works to unblock them.

Currently, we are subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max and even Spotify. Whenever possible, we try to access various libraries all over the world. As a matter of fact, we believe streaming US Netflix is the bare minimum a VPN should allow you to do. But the perfect VPN for streaming is the one that works with all the libraries of Netflix and other platforms consistently.

5. User-friendliness

As a team reviewing VPNs for quite some time, one of the hardest categories to quantify is the server’s user-friendliness or ease of use. While usability usually comes down to one’s personal preferences, we still try to assess every VPN as accurately as possible.

A VPN that is easy and quick to set up earns a higher score. VPNs should not take more than a couple of clicks before connecting to a certain server, with all the available basic options positioned where you would anticipate seeing them.

Apple iOS and macOS, Microsoft Windows, as well as Google Android are what we consider to be the “core” platforms. The majority of VPNs have an application for all of these platforms. In case they don’t, we ask their customer support why and we then include the details in our reviews.

6. Customer Support

With all honesty, we run into some troubles while testing and using VPNs. As a matter of fact, even the top and most expensive VPN is not perfect. But did you know what sets them apart from the other options? It is how it handles the problems of the users. We can testify to it since we’ve been providing VPN reviews for quite some time.

A VPN, at the very least, must have a contact email. After all, no one wants to wait for a couple of days before receiving assistance from the service provider. In simple words, the quicker the better. Based on our experiences, if we don’t receive any feedback after two days, it will only receive one star.

On the other hand, online sources can be of great help as well. Not all people want to talk to humans when trying to resolve a problem. What’s more, not all problems need that. There is no excuse for VPNs not to have the basic troubleshooting guidelines on their site.

If a VPN service has extensive online resources, we will reward it with a positive review on the customer service aspect. Setting up guidelines for a more difficult platform, guides on how to use more innovative features, and troubleshooting for recurrent error codes are huge bonuses.

Having live chat is also a plus point for us. Being able to chat with a real person is a plus because some people don’t want to talk to a chat bot. Luckily, most VPNs have this feature and it is great for customers.

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