IVPN Review 2020

A new day, a new VPN provider to analyze, and it seems this time we’ve stumbled upon IVPN. We strive to build a comprehensive list of VPN service providers for you, along with everything it entails: tests, reviews, company background checks, jurisdiction analysis, Privacy Policy rundowns, you know, the works.

During this literary and, may I add, discovery-based journey, we’ll guide your footsteps through the implications of using IVPN, what you agree to, your rights and responsibilities when using this service, how to create an account, download the app, install and use it effectively, as well as any tips and tricks, if any.

At the end of the article, we’ll draw a conclusion, make a list of pros and cons and give it a rating from 0 to 5, depending on how well it did.

We know that just by looking at the size of the scrolling bar you feel a bit of boredom creeping in, but let’s put that aside for a while and remind ourselves why we’re here for; your security and privacy matter most.

We’ve included a table of contents so you could navigate the contents of this review freely, without having to go through all of the sections, but we’d strongly recommend you to pay attention to stuff like privacy policies and terms of service while you’re out there. Let’s proceed.

• A few company details
• Let’s dig a little deeper
• Terms of Service rundown
• Privacy Policy analysis
• Good security measures
• More security measures
• Encryption modes and multi-hop technology
• A 3-day trial for you to use
• Registering for an account
• Using your dashboard
• Port forwarding and WireGuard
• Downloading the app on your device
• Checking for malware
• Installing IVPN on your computer
• Running it for the first time
• First impressions
• Starting to use IVPN
• The Settings window
• Altering the parameters
• The Firewall
• List of servers you can connect to
• Setting up our operating table
• Security tests just came in
• Speed tests
• Unlocking streaming services
• Online gaming using IVPN
• Using IVPN in China
• TOR and torrenting
• The customer support service
• Money talk
• 7-day money-back guarantee
• Conclusion

A few company details

First thing’s first, we can’t go on with our review if we don’t make proper introductions first. According to their website, the team behind the IVPN project was founded in the year of 2009 by a group of security experts at the prestigious Information Security Group at the University of London (Royal Holloway).

The CEO of the company, Nicholas Pestell, has previously worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland, Network Rail, and ABN AMRO Bank, thus bringing a solid skillset to aid him in leading the IVPN team.

Let’s dig a little deeper

According to their website, the public-facing name of the VPN service is IVPN, but the legal name of the company is Privatus Limited. We also learn that they have no parent or holding companies and that there are no other companies or partners that are directly involved in operating the IVPN service.

The company also claims that they don’t own any VPN review websites and that their business model is based 100% on consumer subscription plans (the revenue is solely generated from selling VPN subscription plans). After a bit of searching around, the company’s (Privatus Limited) headquarters are located in Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is not a member of the 5, 9, 14 Eyes Alliances, so it’s safe to say that there’s little to no chance that your data will leave this country at the request of another state that’s a member of said organizations since Gibraltar is not legally obligated to comply with the Alliances regulations.

Terms of Service rundown

As we’ve done previously in our past reviews, we’re going to give the IVPN Terms of Service document a good, thorough read, extract its very own essence and bring it here to you, just so you can understand in an easier fashion how to use IVPN as responsibly as possible.

• The last time this documentation was updated was on 19th May 2017, so you might want to check for potential changes of this date since it might mean that there were some changes made to the agreement;
• You agree to these terms and conditions by merely using the IVPN services, so if you don’t agree with any or all of the terms and conditions, you should stop using IVPN altogether;
• You are not allowed to hack or attack any other devices on the Internet while using IVPN;
• You are not allowed to perform scans such as proxy hunting or port scanning on other devices on the Internet while using IVPN;
• You are not allowed to transmit malware to other devices on the Internet while using IVPN;
• You are not allowed to use the service to attack IVPN’s servers and/or resources;
• You are not allowed to use IVPN to receive or transmit pirated or copyrighted materials;
• You are not allowed to use IVPN to engage in any form of unsolicited communication, such as spam, pyramid schemes or chain letters;
• You are not allowed to use IVPN to engage in any form of child pornography activities;
• You are not allowed to use IVPN to perform any kind of criminal activities;
• You are not allowed to use the service to perform fraud, phishing or identity theft;
• You are not allowed to promote or encourage criminal or terrorist activities with the help of the service;
• You are not allowed to harass or threaten others by using the service;
• You are not allowed to impair other users’ usage of the service in any way;
• You are not allowed to share your account with others since you’ll be solely responsible for what goes on on your account;
• You are not allowed to pay for IVPN with a stolen credit card;
• You understand that the service is provided to you on an “as is” basis, so no warranties are granted;
• IVPN is not liable for any direct or indirect damages or losses that might arise as a consequence of using their service;
• IVPN does not guarantee the speed of the service, and also offers no guarantee that the service will be uninterrupted;
• IVPN shall never be liable for monetary damages aside from the amount that users pay for the services, which does not include court costs, attorney fees, and other such costs;
• IVPN reserves its right to modify the terms of use documentation, and will take steps to ensure that said changes are brought to your attention by posting them “prominently” on the website and sending emails to existing customers;
• The modifications will take some time to become effective, so if you disagree with any change, you should stop using IVPN immediately;
• It goes without saying that breaking any of the terms will lead to the termination of your account without any prior notification and your rights to a refund will be removed;

Privacy Policy analysis

We’re gonna go ahead and do the exact same thing for the privacy policy since there’s a higher chance that some of the information posted here will stick to you in the long run. It’s your privacy, you should be more concerned about it, after all.

• IVPN claims that it only collects the minimum amount of information from you, in order to maintain their service and keep providing it to you;
• The company also claims that as it will grow, it will attempt to reduce that “personal data footprint”;

What does IVPN collect from you?

• An email address – can be disposable or permanent, doesn’t matter – used for facilitating password resets and sending important security updates;

If you want to opt-out of email communication, you can contact the IVPN support team and they’ll remove you from the mailing list.

The account you create also encompasses a subscription expiry date, to help IVPN manage trial expiries and subscriptions.

Depending on the payment method that you choose during checkout, payment information will be appended to your account as well, such as the ID of the payment, the amount you paid, the currency you’ve chosen, the timestamp of the purchase and/or the PayPal subscription ID.

After your account expires or is terminated, that account and all data associated with it is removed from the IVPN systems except for the client area account, which consists of your email and your password. If you want these details to be deleted as well, you just need to submit a ticket to the billing department and it will be handled.

Data that IVPN doesn’t log:

• Anything in terms of user activity whenever the user is connected or connecting to the VPN.
• No traffic logging
• No DNS request logging
• No connection timestamp or connection duration
• No logging of user bandwidth
• No IP address logging
• No logging of any account activity except total simultaneous connections

Good security measures

Not that the incidence of this stuff happening is something to be alarmed about, but Privatus Limited has taken some measures to protect their customers’ data in case someone gains unauthorized physical access to their servers. This is an extremely good thing, considering that their VPN servers aren’t under their direct physical control and thus they were designed with the expectation that they will be compromised.

Therefore, the following measures have been taken: no logs that relate to the customer connection or network activity are created or stored (that includes temporary or in-memory logs), no authentication credentials or similar data is stored locally and 24/7 monitoring of all servers has been implemented. If any server shows sign of suspicious activity or is taken offline and there’s no evidence from the data center that it’s a hardware fault, server certificates will be revoked to prevent a MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack.

More security measures

The bit described above only covers the unauthorized physical access to the servers, but there’s still the possibility that customer data flows could be monitored. However, they thought about this too and came up with additional security measures such as implementing an Information Security Management System (ISMS) based on ISO 27001, background screening of their employees, vetting server-hosting data centers, mandatory information security training as well as a patch management policy to solve vulnerabilities in a timely manner.

More so, they’ve enforced 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) for system access to all of their servers, use a private company VPN with RSA 4096 authentication certificates, firewalled IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), full disk encryption (LUKS), mandatory access controls, 24/7 monitoring and a configuration management software that helps them enforce consistent configuration and security controls.

Encryption modes and multi-hop technology

Customers benefit from the OpenVPN with RSA-4096 / AES-256-GCM keys technology and a full mesh multi-hop network as well. The multi-hop enables IVPN customers to connect to any location and have their VPN traffic exit in any other location by establishing secure VPN tunnels between every server belonging to the IVPN network. Their VPN servers are all built using Open Source software such as OpenVPN, CentOS, and the sort.

In this situation, anyone who would try to trace any IVPN customer’s connection would only be able to trace it only to the entry VPN server. Also, access to a server would be extremely difficult, since servers would be in multiple jurisdictions. Additionally, customers can further protect their identity by choosing to pay anonymously, using either cash or Bitcoins. Users are also encouraged to send any report of a security vulnerability that they might’ve stumbled upon by providing them with a dedicated inbox and also a PGP encryption key.

A 3-day trial for you to use

Not every VPN service provider is generous enough to include a free trial that you can benefit from before deciding whether you should purchase a subscription plan or not. As a matter of fact, few do. And for good reason, too.

However, IVPN does that and lets you try on their services for a full 3-day full trial period before asking you to purchase a subscription. Three days is more than enough to make a decision, compared to other trial offers that only give you a few hours to decide, or limit your traffic bandwidth to a few hundred MBs.

You still have to provide them with valid payment details, since after the 3-day trial you’ll start being charged for using IVPN. However, if you change your mind, you can just cancel the payment and things will get back to how they were.

Registering for an account

In order to start using IVPN, you need to create an account and to do this, you’re gonna need going through some steps, as follows:

• Head to IVPN;
• Click on the “Get started for free” button
• Choose a subscription plan (Save 16.66% on IVPN now!);
• Input an email address, a password, the billing cycle you prefer, as well as the payment method of your choice;
• Confirm you’re not a robot;
• Review your order;
• Hit the “Start free trial now” button;

The last step will trigger a notification letting you know that your account has been created and asking you what device you’d like the app to be installed on. Accessing your account can be easily done by clicking the “Visit my Client Area” button.

Using your dashboard

As most of the VPN providers do, IVPN grants you an account section (also called a dashboard) that you can use to control various aspects of your account, such as your profile, your password, the current subscription you’re using, the method of payment, but also more advanced features.

It is also possible for you to change the email you’re using for your account, enable or disable Two-Factor Authentication, submit a ticket to the support team and manage your tickets, access an invoice history and even delete your account. The more advanced features we mentioned above are port forwarding and WireGuard.

Port forwarding and WireGuard

Since this topic is a bit more complex than others, we decided to elaborate a bit on the two advanced features in your dashboard: port forwarding and WireGuard.

Port forwarding is a feature that lets computers on the public Internet network to communicate with your PC, while you’re connected to the IVPN network. Since it involves a security risk, this feature is disabled by default and should be used only by customers who are fully aware of the risks. The reserved port number is available on all servers and automatically expires if you don’t connect to the VPN for 14 days.

WireGuard is a new VPN protocol that promises to deliver its users better security and faster speed compared to other protocols like IPSec or OpenVPN. However, you should understand that since the protocol is under heavy development, it should only be used for testing purposes and only if the situation dictates that security is not critical. In this dashboard category, you can access the WireGuard key management and server list, a WireGuard FAQ, as well as guides on how to set up this protocol on various devices.

Downloading the app on your device

If you skipped the download after registering your IVPN account, you can still retrieve the apps by just hovering your mouse cursor over the “Apps” menu on the top toolbar on the website, then list all the device options by clicking “All Apps” or selecting a specific one from the menu.

Note that, while some devices have direct download links (Windows, macOS), others will redirect you to a page where you can retrieve the app (App Store, Google Play) or provide you with a guide on how to set it up (Linux, NAS, routers). Note that on the direct download pages, a SHA1 encryption key is also provided, so that you can double-check with the file you’ve downloaded, see if it’s been tampered with.

You can INSTALL the IVPN application on how many devices you want since they don’t impose this limitation on their customers.

On the other hand, IVPN will only work on a handful of devices at the same time, depending on your subscription. As such, the Standard subscription allows you to use up to 2 devices at the same time, while the Pro tier enables you to connect up to 7 devices at once.

Checking for malware

Well, obviously there’s a bunch of folks who think that malware can’t ever get to them, no matter how many essential security steps they’d skip in their daily routines, but that’s not the case with us, and we’d advise you to go with us on this one.

Every file that comes in touch with your computer should be thoroughly checked, since, as I’m sure you’re perfectly aware of, more and more websites and their content are being targeted nowadays by cyberattacks, turning trustworthy sources into perfect traps.

We always check our files on VirusTotal, since we believe that several antivirus engines checking our uploaded file at the same time is way more effective than relying on a single antivirus solution. IVPN came out clean, except for one little alert triggered by Rising.

However, the alert seems to be a false-positive pretty much, so we’re not too concerned about these results, even though the alert yells “TROJAN.”

Installing IVPN on your computer

We believe that Windows computers are one of the most commonly-owned devices in a household, hence the “your computer” mention in the heading. From our experience, it’s also the installation that’s prone to various sticky situations, although it wouldn’t seem like it.

Besides, getting an app on your iOS or Android device can be done in a matter of seconds. You just visit the store page for whichever app you decide to install, hit a button and that’s it.

Alright, so, getting back to the installation part. Assuming you’ve downloaded the Windows installation kit, double-click it and let’s go. The only steps you need to take during this installation process are clicking the “Next” button on the main screen, then accepting the terms in the License Agreement and hitting the “Install” button.

No additional assistance is required on your side. Maybe if you don’t already have a TAP Network adapter driver on your PC, you’ll be prompted to install one during the setup. Just click the “Install” button when prompted and that’s it. For real this time.

You can choose to launch IVPN right after the setup’s done by ticking the corresponding checkbox at the end of the installation process. The version we installed is 2.11.4.

Running it for the first time

If you launched IVPN, you can notice that instead of asking you for an email address, it requires that you type a username instead. Don’t worry, you can find it in your dashboard that we talked about earlier, in the “VPN Accounts” section.

Type your username and password in the designated fields, hit the “Log In” button and you’re in!

First impressions

The main window of IVPN seems simplistic, but in a neatly-organized sense, not a plain and boring one. No flashy animations, no vividly-colored theme, just a minimalistic window with a bunch of controls and basic info available.

The top of the main screen displays the network you’re currently connected to and also holds the current trust status of the said network. In the middle of the screen, you’ve got the “connect” button, a bit lower you can see the single-hop and multi-hop buttons, the currently selected server, a gear-shaped button that summons the settings window, a connection status button (“i”) and a firewall switch.

They say less is sometimes more and this is just the perfect opportunity to back up this saying. The main window packs a lot of features, but in such a manner that controls don’t seem cluttered or over-complicated.

Starting to use IVPN

Naturally, if you’re going to use IVPN, the first thing you should do is select a server from the list (or two, if you want to use the multi-hop feature) and then you can click the “connect” button in the center of the window.

However, if you’re one who likes taking control, you can start toying around with the extra features IVPN throws at you. First of all, you can change the trust status of the network you’re connected to. This grants it special privileges when using IVPN or deprives it of them, depending on your preferences.

Then you can choose between single-hop, which routes your traffic through a single server, or multi-hop, which lets you select the location you want to connect to and where should your VPN exit traffic be routed to. That means you need to pick two servers when using multi-hop.

Then there’s the “Firewall” switch that, upon enabling, starts blocking traffic depending on its current configuration. But we’ll get there, too. Last, but not least, click the gear-shaped button to summon the settings window where the real fun happens.

The Settings window

So you gathered all your courage and went to the “Settings” window. Notice that it’s been split into multiple sections, thus effectively organizing the settings for easier access. Therefore, we have the “general,” “account,” “connection,” “firewall,” “networks,” “diagnostics” and “openvpn” categories.

Although most of the options can be easily tampered with by toggling them on or off, selecting items from a list or clicking a radio button, it doesn’t mean that these settings are to be toyed with, especially not by users who don’t understand how doing so might affect them.

Unfortunately, there is no split-tunneling functionality, which means that all of your applications have to go through the VPN once you connect to a server. Given the fact that IVPN is quite customizable in every other regard, it’s a bit of a bummer not to have split-tunneling as well, especially since the feature is available in many other popular VPNs on the market.

Altering the parameters

The “general” tab holds, as its name suggests, generic settings that affect the application’s behavior on the device it’s been installed on (in our case, a Windows computer). Therefore you can set it to start at login, minimize to tray, start minimized, automatically connect to the last server on startup or when joining an insecure wireless network, stop the IVPN Windows service when the app is closed and also disconnect and quit without confirmation when closing the app.

The “account” section lets you log out of your account and log into another one if you want to. Here’s where things get a bit more complicated.

The “connection” tab lets you choose your preferred protocol and port combination, set the app to automatically change the port on connection error, enable the usage of obfsproxy (obfuscates traffic) to bypass censorship and pick a network proxy mode.

The “networks” section lets you enable or disable the “Trusted / Untrusted networks control” feature, which lets you define a network as trusted or untrusted and decide what actions to take when joining the networks you configured. The actions you can choose from are connecting or disconnecting to and from the VPN, as well as enabling and disabling the firewall, depending on the network’s status.

The “diagnostics” tab lets you enable logging, which in turn helps you view or submit logs to the IVPN support team in case you encounter any difficulties. The “openvpn” section lets you append additional configuration parameters for OpenVPN, but messing around with this in the wrong way can dramatically affect OpenVPN’s stability, so you should only change those if you understand what you’re doing.

The Firewall

You probably noticed that we’ve left out the “firewall” section of the above section of our review, and for good reason. The firewall isn’t just a firewall, but also an advanced killswitch that makes sure no privacy leaks are possible by blocking traffic whenever you’re not using the VPN.

You can choose between its two profiles, on-demand and always-on. The on-demand profile lets you toggle the “Activate on connect to VPN and deactivate on disconnect” feature, as well as the “Deactivate IVPN Firewall on IVPN Client exit” one. If, on the other hand, you choose the always-on profile, the IVPN firewall will be launched upon Windows startup before any other process and will remain active even if the IVPN client is not running.

You can also toggle some additional firewall options such as allowing LAN traffic when the IVPN firewall is enabled and allowing Multicast when LAN traffic is allowed.

The purpose of this firewall is to prevent leaks from happening in the brief moments between a series of consecutive connections, or if your connection suddenly drops and you miss the notification.

List of servers you can connect to

As mentioned above, IVPN provides you with support for WireGuard as well, despite it is still under heavy development. Therefore, it has WireGuard servers along with regular ones.

As you can see, aside from the location of the servers, IVPN also provides its customers with the address, in case they need to use it to connect manually, due to incompatibility issues with their devices or geographical limitations.

Setting up our operating table

We’ve seen what it’s capable of, we’ve analyzed its grace and got in its entrails for a few moments but now it’s time to see if it can really walk the walk.

We’re going to run a series of security tests as we’ve described in this comprehensive article to determine just exactly how fast can their servers go.

As usual, we’re highly encouraging you to take the same tests using the same tools and see if you get different results.

Security tests just came in

If you can’t hold your horses and desperately need to see the test results before we discuss them, be our guest. The results are right over here:

The only types of data that came in unspoofed consisted of our browser’s user agent and version, operating system version and architecture, screen resolution and JavaScript-based timezone, but those are not even close to being enough for anyone to reveal our identity. So, kudos to IVPN for keeping your connection air-tight and suffering no leaks.

Speed tests

Since we got security checkups out of the way, it’s safe to take IVPN’s servers for a ride and see how fast they can go. The reason why we’re doing this is that we believe that security should always come first, especially when looking for a reliable VPN provider. One of the most important abilities of a VPN is that it can anonymize and secure your connection and if it can’t keep it that way, then what’s the point of using it in the first place?

Instead of going with just one server, or worse, picking the fastest server that IVPN recommended us to use, we’re going to select multiple servers and perform speed tests on each. We’re also aiming for a widespread, so that the server locations vary, thus increasing the chance of the speed test results to vary.

The speed test results are as follows:

The results are fairly decent in terms of speed, and more than decent latency-wise.

Unlocking streaming services

Many agree on the fact that VPN providers are also a great asset because they can help you bypass censorship and access contents that would otherwise be unavailable to you.

Such an example would be Netflix. Initially, Netflix was designed to be used exclusively by US residents. However, recently they’ve broadened this user range and let other countries join in the fun. Only there’s a catch: US customers have a far richer library of contents than non-US customers.

IVPN does manage to unlock Netflix in certain cases, but it’s worth pointing out that not all the US servers work for this purpose. In essence, it’s a bit of a trial-and-error situation, which means that your results may vary. Granted, you can still unlock it eventually, but the extra work is a bit bothersome.

Additionally, IVPN does not seem to work for other services, such as BBC iPlayer, which is a bit of a bummer. Many other VPNs are capable of unblocking a variety of services without the additional hassle, so IVPN loses a few points in this regard.

Online gaming using IVPN

One of the best things about IVPN is the fact that you get to enjoy very low latencies on most servers, which translates into a great online gaming experience as well. Our tests show that pings rarely reach 300 ms, even when the distance between you and the server is very big, which is impressive to say the least.

Hence, it should be quite easy to remain competitive while gaming with IVPN running in the background, given the fact that the VPN connection does not affect your latency very much. On the other hand, it obviously depends on the chosen server and location, so keep that in mind as well.

Using IVPN in China

As we’ve seen during our China-related article, IVPN is a good choice if you happen to live in China, or if you are traveling there and you want to still be able to access the free Internet. In essence, this is thanks to the fact that IVPN provides you with a variety of obfuscation methods, including obfuscated proxy settings that enable you to bypass the Great Firewall.

On top of that, you also have the option to set up IVPN using OpenVPN or WireGuard, just in case the native app does not work as intended due to DNS poisoning or government interference. While this takes a bit more work than simply installing an app, it’s definitely a small price to pay in exchange for access to free information.

Speaking of payment, IVPN also enables you to pay for a subscription using Bitcoin, which is definitely a lot harder to track than a credit card or a PayPal account. Hence, you should be able to extend your subscription from China without attracting too much attention.

Lastly, not all servers work as intended in China, which means that you need to manually search for the servers that offer the best results since there is no official list of servers that are proven to work in China. Not only that, but some servers may also stop working after a while, so it’s a good idea to keep changing them regularly.

TOR and torrenting

First of all, we have to mention that you can use TOR in conjunction with IVPN. However, you must make sure that you run IVPN and connect to a VPN server before launching TOR and connecting to its network. More so, you need to understand that despite the fact that you’re adding an extra layer of security to your connection, the speed will be drastically affected. In a bad way.

Now for the torrenting part. Many of you choose to hide behind a VPN service whenever you engage into P2P or torrenting activities and hey, what you do in the comfort of your own house is none of our beeswax. IVPN allows the use of torrent clients on their servers, but they kindly request that you use non-US servers when engaging in this type of activity (P2P), including exit nodes on multi-hop since they received a lot of DMCA notices and as a result, were threatened with the disconnection of their servers.

The customer support service

If for one reason or another, you want to get in touch with the IVPN team, you can do so by either clicking the red bar (if offline) at the bottom-right corner of their website or navigate to the “Submit Ticket” section on your dashboard. In case the live chat is online, the bar changes color to green.

The only downside is that the chat service isn’t available 24/7, but when it is, chances are you’ll get a reply in a matter of minutes. The customer support agents are friendly and eager to help you solve the issue you’re describing or ask your questions. Usually, they will redirect you to the FAQ section or various articles but are eager to help if your problem is more specific.

Submitting a ticket isn’t a waste of time either. We received comprehensive answers to our queries in a timely manner. If you don’t want to use either communication channel, you can turn to the IVPN knowledge base, which is extensive and features lots of guides, articles and also comes with a search function that can help you find what you’re looking for quickly.

Money talk

Alright, so we covered everything we deemed important about IVPN, but now it’s time to get real and talk about the money. We’ve already mentioned that it comes with a 3-day trial for you to try before deciding whether purchasing a subscription plan is worth it or not, so let’s jump straight to business.

IVPN comes with three subscription plans: a monthly subscription plan, a quarterly one and an annual one.

As you can see, the prices aren’t exactly low, but considering what this VPN provider has in store for you, it’s probably worth it. You can choose between Credit Card, PayPal, BitPay and cash to pay for these subscription plans.

7-day money-back guarantee

One last thing. If you’re not entirely sure that you did the right thing by purchasing an IVPN subscription plan or you feel that a VPN isn’t exactly what you need right now or whatever the reason might be, you can ask for a refund if no more than 7 days have passed. Just to be on the safe side, don’t ask for a refund on the 7th day. That’s not a cool move and the reason why they didn’t offer a wider timeframe; because of freeloaders that try to exploit this money-back system.

Anyway, they won’t ask you for any specific reason or enforce ridiculous conditions that you must meet to become eligible for a refund. Just that you must be on time with your refund request and be understanding if, due to technical issues, it lasts longer to get your money back (up to 30 days).

Conclusion

To wrap it up, IVPN is, as its name suggests, a VPN service provider that can help you anonymize your connection, keeping it secure and preventing prying eyes from spying on your online activities while also letting you access contents that are otherwise unavailable to you.

The company behind this project has been founded in 2009 and its headquarters is currently in Gibraltar. Although it’s British Overseas Territories so technically not a part of the 5, 9, 14 Eyes Alliance, the possibility that the British government can exert some pressure over them is not to be excluded.

Their policy clearly states that nothing related to your online activity while connected to IVPN will be monitored, logged, stored, you name it and that in case of a DMCA notice or a legal request or a court order, they won’t be able to reveal your real identity to authorities since the only bit of information related to you that’s stored in their system is your email address and sometimes payment information.

More so, their legal department only takes into consideration requests that come from government or law enforcement agencies with their jurisdiction in Gibraltar and every other request that is deemed as invalid is either challenged or rejected. The company also plans on notifying users whose identities are sought after and features a warrant canary on their website as well.

Privatus Limited (the company behind IVPN) takes multiple security measures to ensure that the integrity of their servers and implicitly of their customers’ data remains intact.

Their application can be easily downloaded, installed and executed on your computer or device of choice. IVPN comes with a 3-day trial that lets you take it on a test drive before committing to buying a subscription plan. You can install it on how many devices you want, but can only use it from 7 devices at the same time, on the same account.

The application comes with both simplistic and more advanced features, making it suitable for both novices and professionals alike.

Their network of servers is somewhat narrow, but the quality of their servers is top-notch, providing you with airtight security and high speed as well.

It can successfully unlock Netflix sometimes, and it enables you to use TOR in conjunction with their VPN and also engage in torrenting or P2P file-sharing activities. However, if you plan on torrenting or use P2P sharing, they kindly request of you that you use non-US servers, as they received a lot of DMCA notices and have been threatened with the disconnection of their servers there.

Three different subscription plans are provided to you: a monthly one, a quarterly one and a yearly one. Although a bit pricey, consider the amount of good stuff they throw at you before making your call. They make a point when saying “Cheap, fast or secure. You can only choose two.”

Their customer support lets you get in touch by means of live chat or ticket submission, but if you don’t feel like talking they also have a comprehensive knowledge base that can help you attempt to solve your issues by yourself.

Privatus Limited also practices a 7-day money-back guarantee, one that doesn’t ask for much except that you be on time with your refund request and understand that sometimes getting your money back can take as long as 30 days.

PROs:
+ Zero-logging policy; (5)
+ Great security; (4)
+ Great latency on almost all servers; (5)
+ Unlimited device installation and a wide range of devices supported; (5)
+ TOR and torrenting supported; (4)
+ 3-day trial; (5)
+ Decent download speeds; (4)
+ Firewall, WireGuard, and Port Forwarding supported (as well as other advanced features); (5)

CONs:
– Narrow list of servers; (2.5)
– Doesn’t unlock all streaming services; (2)
– No split-tunneling support (2)

We give IVPN a 3.95/5 rating.