IPVanish
Overall User Rating – (Jump to user reviews)
Website: www.ipvanish.com
Price: $6.49 / Month. (If purchased via 12-month plan) Accepts Bitcoins.
Our Rating: – 93.4%
Protection: 4.5/5
Software / GUI: 5/5
Features: 4.5/5
Speed: 5/5
Ease of Use: 4.5/5
Service Overview and Reviews
Protocols: Open VPN, PPTP and L2TP.
Service: IPVanish offers a paid VPN service with 1100+ servers in 60+ countries allowing you to hide behind 40,000+ shared IPs.
The Windows and Mac software clients are very good and are both easy to set up and use and include extensive features.
From the dashboard you can easily see from the map the server you are connected to, view diagnostics and set up auto connect and reconnect options.
Server selection in the software is simple and you can select from OpenVPN (UDP or TCP), L2TP, or PPTP before you connect and there is a choice of two ports. You can set your IP address to change automatically and verify the address from a number of sources.
Config files and instructions and also provided for manual set-up of OpenVPN, PPTP or L2TP on all platforms including for Linux and Routers.
For mobile devices there is an excellent app available for Android, iPhone, and iPad. Manual set-up instructions are also available if required.
Ten simultaneous connections are allowed per user account, which always a great plus given the ever expanding use of mobile devices and there is a 7-day money back guarantee.
Privacy: IPVanish logs the times you connect to and disconnect from IPVanish, but do not log any user activity (e.g. what websites you visit, who you chat/talk to, or what data is transferred). Users are given dynamic and shared IP addresses on the same servers so tracking individual usage is not possible. See their Policy/Terms/FAQ
Our Thoughts: IPVanish have expanded rapidly recently and now have an extensive network of servers in multiple countries. The software is a cinch to set-up and use, connections are reliable, and speeds were very, very good in our tests.
Service and support is quick and extremely helpful. They seem to take any issues seriously.
To get the most out of their speed, OpenVPN (UDP) seemed to be consistently the fastest and most stable when doing our testing, followed by l2tp and OpenVPN (TCP). We didn’t bother checking PPTP since it’s the least preferred protocol these days. With a few exceptions, choosing servers based on lower ping times (less than ~200) seemed to be a somewhat reliable starting indicator of performance. Also, it’s helpful to know that “a” labelled servers are Tier 1, with “b” and “c” being lower tier. However, that doesn’t always correlate to actual performance.
IPVanish User Reviews
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Please rate IPVanish from your own experience via the form at the bottom of this page.
IPVanish Speed Test Results
IPVanish Speed Test
Below you can see our testing results for IPVanish. For more details of how we conduct our speed tests go to VPN Speed Tests
Test PC #1 – United States – OS (Win 7) – ISP (Cox)
| SpeedTest.net (Firefox) | Location | Ping | Download | Upload |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 25 | 34.1 | 12.59 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 26 | 26.57 | 8.84 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 158 | 10.66 | 4.32 |
| OpenVPN | Canada | 105 | 16.88 | 8.18 |
| OpenVPN | Switzerland | 195 | 10.83 | 5.13 |
| OpenVPN | South Korea | 205 | 11.64 | 7.59 |
| OpenVPN | Germany | 178 | 15.59 | 6.32 |
| Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 845M | 2851k | 05:03 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 845M | 2323k | 06:12 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 845M | 1574k | 09:09 |
| OpenVPN | Canada | 845M | 2485k | 05:48 |
| OpenVPN | Switzerland | 845M | 1512k | 09:32 |
| OpenVPN | South Korea | 845M | 1695k | 08:30 |
| OpenVPN | Germany | 845M | 1864k | 07:44 |
| P2P Test (Deluge) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 763Mb | 2.47Mb | 05:09 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 763Mb | 2.38Mb | 05:20 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 763Mb | 2.45Mb | 05:11 |
| OpenVPN | Canada | 763Mb | 2.41Mb | 05:17 |
| OpenVPN | Switzerland | 763Mb | 2.22Mb | 05:43 |
| OpenVPN | South Korea | 763Mb | 1.86Mb | 06:50 |
| OpenVPN | Germany | 763Mb | 2.05Mb | 06:13 |
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 | Austria | 72 | 8.41 | 0.63 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 181 | 6.42 | 1.53 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 46 | 9.84 | 0.82 |
| OpenVPN | Netherlands | 67 | 9.02 | 2.36 |
| Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 620M | 1241k | 08:31 |
| OpenVPN | Austria | 620M | 1029k | 10:16 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 620M | 457k | 23:08 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 620M | 1139k | 09:17 |
| OpenVPN | Netherlands | 620M | 1071k | 09:52 |
| P2P Test (uTorrent) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 701Mb | 1.1Mb | 10:42 |
| OpenVPN | Austria | 701Mb | 1.0Mb | 11:38 |
| OpenVPN | United States | 701Mb | 0.77Mb | 15:38 |
| OpenVPN | United Kingdom | 701Mb | 1.0Mb | 11:35 |
| OpenVPN | Netherlands | 701Mb | 1.0Mb | 10:55 |
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.
Best VPN I have found so far and I have tested many. Speeds are excellent and so is the customer support team. After the first month turning out to so great, I contacted support via their live chat to upgrade to the yearly plan and they fixed me up straight away -great service. Their VPN takes anything I have thrown at it in terms of different kinds of traffic, supports P2P, netflix HD streaming and even nntp (Usenet). No logging and great value for the price.
IP Vanish has absolutely the worst customer service, atrocious communications and no moral business ethics whatsoever. I’ve subscribed to BTGuard, Torguard and Private Internet Access and all 3 provided me with activation emails within 30 seconds of the Paypal transaction I paid with. After paying IP Vanish with Paypal for one of their VPN accounts, it was like they vanished from the surface of the Earth because I never heard a peep back from them. No order confirmation email, no activation email and not even a thank you. Only after filing a dispute with Paypal did they finally get off their fat rear ends and respond to my grievances. One email they sent me stated I was at fault because IP Vanish claimed they did send me the activation email, but I ignored it. What a bunch of BS. When I was able to demonstrate that IP Vanished lied and never sent me the activation email, they decide to change their story around. This time they said my request for a VPN account was denied based on undesirable info during my signup.
For those who have never dealt with IP Vanish, signup info consists of the 3 items when using Paypal to pay. 1st was Desired username, 2nd is Password, and 3rd was email address. Not sure how these 3 pieces of vague information would deem me an undesirable client. Clearly, this is more BS they made up to save face in the eyes of Paypal. Only after threatening to get Visa to intervene on my behalf, did the SOB’s at IP Vanish finally issue me a refund. What a horrible experience.
I thought BTGuard had horrendous customer service, but IP Vanish is far worse.
BE FORE WARNED, don’t believe all the raving positive reviews for IP Vanish. I wouldn’t be surprised if owners and staff at IP Vanish wrote these reviews on their own behalf and posted them using all sorts of different usernames and varying IP addresses. After all, they do have the infrastructure to do so. If you do decide to sign up with IP Vanish, pray you get their activation email within 5 minutes, otherwise, be prepared to file a dispute to get your money back.
Klee –
We’re so sorry you had a bad experience and want you to know we are listening, and actively working on increasing our support team’s presence and response time. We do on occasion have users who for whatever reason, miss the activation email at first glance, but we apologize for not looking into it further initially. We know like any company, there is always room for improvement, and our initial response to your particular situation will serve as an excellent example of how we can improve our support communications.
If you’re willing to work with us, we’d love to look into your issue further to see how we could have gotten it right. We completely understand if you’d prefer not to do so, but we value your opinion regardless. Please email us directly at pr@ipvanish.com with either your ticket number from support (should look similar to IPVS-####) or your user name, and we’ll research the issue and bring it up with our support management staff. We understand your frustration, and hope that we can help.
Thank you so much for taking the time to provide feedback. We love to hear both positive and negative experiences so we can learn from both.
The IPVanish Team
LOVE IPVANISH!! You’re in the wrong if you’re using any other vpn provider.
Excellent service overall. Speed is really good.
Geolocalization on some websites may show a different location from the server location, which can be annoying when you want to access some geo-locked content (ie foreign tv broadcasting).
I contacted the Customer Service once, mentioning one of their server appearing in another country for many websites. Their answer was pretty fast, and they actually did something since like a week after, the server was rightly geolocalized.
In a nutshell, excellent and stable speed, very good customer service, allows P2P, has NAT firewall, no bandwidth limit, and reasonable, flat rate pricing.
All I have to say about these guys is my GOD the speed is awesome….U.S. U.K. and Canada servers all match the speed of my comcast connection – pretty sweet, thanks for the recommend 🙂
A friend referred me to IPVanish after I got tired of HMA servers being down. Signup was easy, after I signed up they sent me an email with a simple one click activation link, clicked that then my account was active. They also sent a nice welcome email with links to their software and how to get started. Getting connected was really easy, the software is super simple, you can connect to any server using openvpn, pptp, l2tp. Speeds are the best I’ve seen from any vpn provider I’ve tried, including HMA and Private. Solid service, highly recommend.
When I first signed up for this service, I had to verify the e-mail, I was told, because it was not an ISP e-mail (really, who has that anymore?). I installed the software, and a few days later, I noticed the software was no longer installed. I re-downloaded the newer version, and used it for several months. I cancelled after further software problems and slowed download speeds. I used a VPN provided by a usenet service provider. It was better, but still slow, and very expensive, so I went to re-sign up with IP Vanish. They once again said I needed to “verify my e-mail”, but they wanted certain proofs, many of which would include very personal information they don’t need. I used the most innocuous verification they listed, and they refused it, demanding ID that I felt was not appropriate for a VPN service. This all became very CREEPY to me, so I told them to forget it. Who are these guys? They only have online contact, and further investigation revealed nothing. For all I know, this is the NSA>