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
To all the people complaining about slow speeds in the US, you may want to upgrade your ISP speeds or you may have already been throttled for being an idiot.. I always max out my bandwidth on downloads. I sit anywhere from 1mbs to 2mbs when Dling torrents while on or off the VPN service. Have never tried their support line as I have never needed it. Protection is perfect. Reliability – have only had it d/c once on me. I will be checking out a few other VPN services before I decide on one for a full year. So far BTguard is on my top 3 list.
Very slow from US. I’d love to seed but I cant until I take the proxy off.
I have been using BTGuard for about 6 months. I have never received a letter. It disconnects often so i use VPN Watch. I am looking for other options. It is often very slow. I am out of the United States. I get speeds usually between 2kb/s….average 50kb/s and max out at 300kb/s.
Works just fine and torrents run at max speed. Tech support could be better organised on the web site. Encryption module (if used) causes failure of udp trackers, but this is not necessary unless ISP throttling is an issue.
Quick and easy setup, speeds is good so good i can max out my bandwidth and it’s cheap.
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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.