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Comment by gilrain | Hacker News Reader

In addition to its excellent scorecard here, I can report that I've been extremely happy with IVPN. Very easy to deal with, even for detailed, technical support requests. I got an immediate response from an engineer which addressed my complaint in detail (poor port forwarding setup), and even gave me a timeline for when they were going to fix it. And they did fix it! The port forwarding is great, now.

Also, since this does matter a lot: I have a 100 Mbps connection, and I get between 50-80 Mbps through almost all of their servers, barring understandably slow countries like Hong Kong.

Oh, also, they have multihop, and you select your own entry and exit server from among their pool.

I have no relationship with them, just a satisfied customer, relieved to have found a reliable, consumer VPN after many attempts.

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I'm on IVPN now as my primary mostly due to this chart and my only gripes are:

It's expensive compared to the others, at $100 a year. I've never seen it go cheaper than this in any sales of any kind.

Some sites like Google will mark you as a bot and force captchas for searches, probably due to its userbase and their shared IPs.

Comparatively fewer servers compared to popular VPNs like PIA and TorGuard. This leads to me getting the same IP address for each server I connect to. Not sure if this is a pro or a con.

Otherwise, speed has been good, connection has been stable (a few disconnects here and there but it seems to have smoothed out for now), and I hope the chart is accurate in terms of security and privacy on their part.

I've tested many others including AirVPN and NordVPN as well but haven't seen a definitive reason yet for the higher price tag on IVPN. Not that I'm not happy with IVPN, which I am, I'm just also an incredible cheapskate.

In terms of security and speed, the two 'premium' VPNs are IVPN and VikingVPN. Viking also offers fantastic customer support, but my only gripe is that they don't run their own DNS servers (they use Cisco's OpenDNS). They also don't offer any exit nodes in Canada, but the company head (Derek) says it's because Viking is worried about Canada's data retention laws.

Likewise, I'm not affiliated with IVPN nor VikingVPN in any way. I think both are great choices.

Viking seems much more limited—and is US-based, which creates its own problems.

IVPN does look interesting, so I’ll have to re-review them… I’m still on Freedome’s trial, and it’s been working stellar including comparable speeds. Exit nodes in certain countries are also an important factor in my consideration, admittedly.

Multihop. Not many offer that. Insorg does, and it's even more expensive. Also CryptoStorm, but they're new, and come off as rather crazed. Others?

From what I've tested, NordVPN has "Double VPN" servers: https://nordvpn.com/servers/

And AirVPN has Routing servers used for double-hops: https://airvpn.org/status/

Right. Thanks :)

Not that I'm promoting any of them, I have my specific gripes with each of them as well.

NordVPN for instance has a ton of servers yet doesn't label the regional locations for them in the OpenVPN filenames. They're just labeled US-1 to US-339 and I ended up having to add random configs and hope it's one near my area. Their server map isn't accurate either and doesn't show all of them.

AirVPN I'm concerned with their user logging as they have this hub area for the community that reveals your username and when you're online as well as how much data you use and have a rankings for users or servers that use the most data each day/month. There's a log in anonymously checkbox but it's still a bit worrying to me.

I trust AirVPN. It's pretty typical for forum software to show when users are logged in. That has nothing to do with the VPN service. They do show VPN throughput for top users. That's a marketing thing, I think. And I'm pretty sure that users need to authorize having their names appear.

I also find NordVPN's labeling to be very confusing.

this is the biggest problem for NordVPN for me as well. Loading their configs in Linux is a bit of a pain.

Interesting.

I was checking various sites benchmarking VPNs and I remember them reporting IVPN speeds being around 3Mbps. Good to know that's not the case.

Couple of things that are missing. I use IPSec/L2TP. Does not seem to have columns tracking these. I did a bunch of sorting and filtering and the following seem to be the only providers that check all the marks for no logging and good business practices.

* AzireVPN

* IVPN

* SecureVPN.to

* Trust.Zone

How can you know whether providers are lying about not logging? How do you know whether their hosting and uplink providers are logging?

One thing you can objectively determine is how long they've been in business. Use https://archive.org/web/ for that. Then filter for bad news. HMA giving up users to LEA. Anonymizer being owned by the CIA. Any VPN service that's been in business for at least five years, and has no bad news, is probably OK.

You can learn something when different operators are involved in court cases and either provide, or are unable to provide certain information. Currently PrivateInternetAccess is risking contempt of court charges if they've lied about their logging policies, in their response to a federal subpoena.[0]

[0]https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tes...

That's good news! PIA tends to get dumped on for being US-based and ultra-low-cost.

I can't.

I was just going off of what was presented on the spreadsheet. However based on my filtering, IVPN certainly seems worth checking out.

I'm not sure why Gibraltar (where IVPN is located) is considered to be outside the "fourteen eyes". It's a British Overseas Territory, and as such falls within the jurisdiction of the UK.

IVPN rebuts that argument at some length:

> What is the relationship between Gibraltar and UK?

> The main relationship between Gibraltar and UK stems from the fact that the British monarch is the head of state of both Gibraltar and UK. However, such a relationship is not enough to make Gibraltar a part of UK. For example, no one argues that Andorra is a part of France although the President of France is the head of Andorra (together with the Spanish/Roman Catholic Bishop of Urgell).

https://www.ivpn.net/blog/should-gibraltar-be-classified-as-...

I find that to be a weak argument. The "main relationship" does not "stem" simply from a shared head of state. Nor does anybody claim that Gibraltar is "part of the UK", but rather that their status as a BOT means that they are subject to UK sovereignty and jurisdiction. It's quite true that Gibraltar is mostly self-governing, except in matters of defence and foreign affairs, which are managed centrally from London. However, that doesn't mean that ultimately they are not subject to UK jurisdiction. It's quite reasonable not to care, but it's still good to know.

> It's quite reasonable not to care, but it's still good to know.

I agree entirely.

They claim to be outside of UK jurisdiction for a number of bills, although I'm not qualified to judge the veracity of these claims - again from https://www.ivpn.net/blog/should-gibraltar-be-classified-as-...

> Gibraltarian VPN service providers are not obliged to comply with the comprehensive UK laws regulating the information society

> RIPA does not apply to Gibraltar.

> The GRA [Gibraltar Regulatory Authority] supervises the enforcement of the Data Protection Act 2004, a Gibraltarian law implementing the European data protection laws.

I also use IVPN, and I'm extremely happy with them. I used to use Viscosity to access them, but recently I've switched over to IVPN's own software. It makes choosing multi-hops easier, and comes with a option to block non-VPN traffic.

iVPN's Windows and OSX clients have the best leak protection that I've seen. I have not managed to make them leak.

Edit: I do freelance for them, by the way.

So you don't use Tunnelblick, eh? Not at all concerned about that? Is IVPN's client's source code publicly reviewable and/or audited?

Edit: Not being sarcastic/rhetorical. Actually asking.

I don't actually use OSX ;) Just for testing. See https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-perform-a-vpn-lea... for what I did.

I get the open-source concern. I prefer using stock OpenVPN. But if you're going to do that, you need to manage your DNS servers, and firewall leaks. I'm not aware that iVPN provides source code. You could ask them.

You wrote that guide for IVPN? That's really great work. It gets a lot of burn on /r/VPN

Thanks :)

I'm working on a better testing setup ...

Another satisfied customer here. I've been using them without issue for just over a year and it has been excellent. As my other comment in this thread would suggest, I just wanted a simple solution with a low barrier to entry.

Have you tried gaming through the VPN perchance?

One interesting thing that I did learn today is that multiple games use p2p for in-game voice chat thereby leaking IP addresses.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/4adapc/divisio...?

Often I forget to disconnect from IVPN while playing low latency games like FPS. I mostly don't notice.

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