BTGuard
Website: www.btguard.com
Price: $9.95 / Month
Our Rating: – 65%
Protection: 4/5
Software / GUI: 3/5
Features: 3/5
Speed: 2.5/5
Ease of Use: 5/5
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Service Overview and Reviews
Service: BTGuard comes in two flavors (and prices):-
As a Bittorrent Proxy – BTGuard’s paid proxy service ($6.95 / Month), through which you pass your download traffic, hides the IP-addresses of its users from the public and any tracking will see the BTGuard IP address rather than your own and therefore your identity effectively stays hidden from view.
As a VPN Service – BTGuard’s VPN service ($9.95 / Month), operates much like any other VPN, securing your internet connection and rendering your web browsing and other net services anonymous. The server network is limited to Canada, Netherlands(EU) and Singapore so pick the nearest server to your location, P2P downloads should then be at least reliable and secure.
Privacy: BTGuard does not log customer IP addresses or customer usage. See their Policy/Terms/FAQ
Our Thoughts: We tested the VPN service (not the proxy service) and it’s a basic, no frills affair. Set-up is easy and BTGuard works via the standard OpenVPN GUI. However, we found connecting via PPTP instead slightly increased the server speeds. We also found the Canada server very overloaded and slow at times and experienced more consistent results connecting via the EU server.
If only occasional/light P2P file sharing is your thing the EU server should work ok. However, if you are looking for more, you may find the limited server network restricting (For example, it’s no good for US or UK online TV network streaming).
See our Best VPN for Torrents
Disclaimer: Know the laws in your country and locality. BestVPNForYou.com do not suggest, condone, or practice the violation of national or international copyright law. That being said, we do support fundamental reforms of copyright laws as proposed by the Pirate Party political and activist organizations around the world.
BTGuard User Reviews
Summary
Reviews
Great value, decent speeds most of the time and hides my IP address. Interface is slick and easy to use so what more could you want except for a few more server locations. That said it meets my needs.
Decided to go for the full VPN package and am more than happy. Slows down a bit at night but thats to be expected. I always download during the day anyway and speeds are close to normal ISP. Very easy to use and set-up.
Good enough service from my end. Speeds tend to drop at peak times and you need look for torrents with the most seeds. Pretty much what you’d expect for chump change every month.
This is a Great Service. Easy and quick to set up et also very reliable. I am using it every day… And I am fully happy with it.
Merci BT Guard.
So far so good.
Only tried it with uTorrent though. I used to like Vuze but it’s a memory hog and grinds my shitty laptop to a halt.
Please rate this VPN from your own experience via the form below:-
BTGuard Speed Test Results
BTGuard Speed Test
Below you can see our testing results for BTGuard. For more details of how we conduct our speed tests go to VPN Speed Tests.
Test PC #1 – United States – OS (Mac OSX) – ISP (Cox)
SpeedTest.net (Chromium) | Location | Ping | Download | Upload |
Not Using VPN | United States | 24 | 22.53 | 7.2 |
PPTP | EU | 166 | 4.14 | 2.99 |
PPTP | Canada | 101 | 1.24 | 1.33 |
Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
Not Using VPN | United States | 620M | 1841K | 05:44 |
PPTP | EU | 620M | 520K | 20:19 |
P2P Test (Transmission) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
Not Using VPN | United States | 729.1Mb | 1.58Mb | 07:41 |
PPTP | EU | 729.1Mb | 0.73Mb | 16:20 |
PPTP | Canada | 729.1Mb | 0.27Mb | 45:09 |
Test PC #2 – United Kingdom – OS (Win 7) – ISP (Sky)
SpeedTest.net (Firefox) | Location | Ping | Download | Upload |
Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 32 | 10.56 | 0.94 |
OpenVPN | EU | 41 | 9.94 | 0.84 |
Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 620M | 1241k | 09:00 |
OpenVPN | EU | 620M | 1174k | 12:01 |
P2P Test (uTorrent) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 695Mb | 1.1Mb | 10:22 |
OpenVPN | EU | 695Mb | 1.0Mb | 11:05 |
Tips: If you’re having trouble with connecting, but not actually seeing your IP address change, try checking the option in your VPN settings to “use the VPN for all traffic” (or similar wording). That isn’t specified in some of the instructions and we had this trouble in a couple instances with PPTP connections. Checking that solved the problem.
The Canada server seems to be under heavy load and a bit slow.
PPTP via their EU server seems to have the best and most consistent speeds, especially from the US. We found that OpenVPN seems to sacrifice performance quite a bit when connecting from the US. In Europe though, OpenVPN still seems to provide great speeds when connecting to the EU server.
Note: The handshake protocol (MSCHAP_V2) used by many PPTP connections has been cracked and therefore PPTP could now be considered unencrypted. For maximum security use OpenVPN or L2TP.