IPVanish Review 2024 — A Safe VPN, But Is It Any Good?

IPVanish offers high-speed connections and an impressive list of advanced security features at a budget-friendly price.

For this review, we put IPVanish through its paces. We thoroughly tested its speed, performance, ease of use, and ability to access popular platforms. It performed highly in all areas of my tests.

You can save 78% with IPVanish’s current discount, and can even test it out free for 30 days with its money-back guarantee.

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Speeds — Fast and Consistent

IPVanish provided me with fast speeds, regardless of the server I connected to. Buffering is an issue for almost everyone. Nobody likes wasting time staring at an unwanted screen.

When you’re connected to a VPN, your connection speed may drop slightly because your data is traveling farther to reach a remote server. However, this speed loss should be barely noticeable.

In fact, if your local network is subject to congestion or ISP throttling, you may even gain speed with a VPN.

Your connection speed is measured based on its ping, download speed, and upload speed.

Its ping indicates how quickly you will get a response from a website once you’ve sent a request, or clicked on a link. The lower your ping, the faster your connection will respond. Ping is measured in milliseconds (ms).

Its download speed measures how quickly you can download information from a server to your device. This affects your loading times, and the speed at which you can download files from the internet. Download speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps).

The upload speed tells us how fast your connection can send data to other devices and websites. It affects how long it takes to upload large files, share photos, and other digital media. Upload speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps).

With all of this in mind, I tested my IPVanish connection for speed loss, and I was pleasantly surprised.

My speed before connecting to IPVanish was 12.39 Mbps download, with 0.79 Mbps upload and a ping of 23 ms.

When I connected to my local IPVanish server, my download speed dropped to 8.46 Mbps. My upload speed stayed almost the same at 0.73Mbps, and my ping increased to 58 ms.

On an overseas (US) IPVanish server, my download speed decreased again to 7.12 Mbps. My upload speed dropped slightly to 0.71 Mbps. which is still quite fast.

Although my latency suffered a small amount while connected to the US server, it remained within normal limits. I barely noticed any change in loading times while browsing the internet.

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Server Network — Well Distributed

IPVanish has 2,400 servers in 90 countries, which is a decent number. Usually, it’s best to choose VPNs with large server networks to avoid slowdowns due to the number of people connected to them.

With IPVanish, it wasn’t the case. Each server I tested performed great and I didn’t encounter any connection issues.

Security — Strong Protection

IPVanish keeps you protected online with its many security features.

It safeguards your data with military-grade 256-bit AES encryption. This is virtually unbreakable. Even if your internet traffic is intercepted by cybercriminals or government spies, they won’t be able to read your data. It will just look like a series of random numbers and letters.

IPVanish uses DNS leak prevention technology to ensure your identity is always protected. Sometimes your DNS requests can accidentally be routed to your ISP’s DNS servers, even happening when you’re connected to a VPN. This reveals your real IP location to websites, and allows your ISP to track your online activity.

I ran several tests to check the DNS leak prevention while connected to IPVanish, and couldn’t find any leaks.

An automatic kill switch makes sure your IP address isn’t accidentally exposed in case of a dropped connection with the VPN server. Kill switches are quickly becoming standard in the industry. I was disappointed to discover that this feature is only available for macOS and Windows.

Overall, I’m impressed with its performance and I’m confident that IPVanish can keep you safe online.

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Privacy — Strict Privacy Policy

Today, IPVanish claims to keep a strict no-logs policy.

This was not the case during a data-logging scandal in 2016. IPVanish complied with the Department of Homeland Security’s request for user information. The individual was involved in a child abuse and pornography investigation, and ultimately, this information helped the investigation. However, their compliance proved that they kept logs.

It is important to remember that the IPVanish provider is based in the US, and therefore subject to the 5/9/14 Eyes’ jurisdiction. This means that they can be summoned to turn over any records they have on an individual to the government.

But is this a security threat to you or me? Well, no, mostly because this issue has been resolved. IPVanish was acquired by StackPath in 2017, and its new management guarantees that they do not store any logs.

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Simultaneous Device Connections — Unlimited

One big advantage to IPVanish is that you can connect an unlimited number of devices with a single account. This is more than most of its competitors. I tested it with 7 different devices, and my connection never dropped on any of them.

Device Compatibility — Great Variety

IPVanish offers apps for all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Linux, and Chromebook. You can even install it on your router for network-wide protection.

As an added bonus, it supports light/dark mode features too. That way you can match it to your mobile device preferences.

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