These days, we should all be taking our privacy more seriously. The age of near-instant connection and convenience has made it easy to leave one’s personal or sensitive data open to attack vectors. This is one of the reasons why I suggest either purchasing a VPN subscription or making your own (if you have the know-how and necessary tools). A VPN service I’ve switched to recently is VPN.AC. I’ve been using it for about 9 months now.
Security: 5/5
One of the most obvious criteria on which to judge a VPN is the level of its security and the integrity of its ecosystem. VPN.ac was suggested to me by a colleague whom I trust for all things infosec. I was immediately impressed by the choices it provides in actual protocols themselves. Luckily, for those who are less familiar with which protocols are best for their security needs, VPN.AC does a good job at suggesting one to start off with: OpenVPN.
The company behind VPN.AC is actually a Romanian IT security firm, and they continually probe their own security infrastructure to ensure that their clients are getting the best and most secure product possible. I don’t mean to make that sound like marketing speak, but honestly, this is something that is really important to me. When malicious actors don’t sleep, neither should the team you’ve paid to protect you.
No user activity is logged or stored anywhere (Romania actually has pretty robust legislation forbidding that). The only logged items are connections to the VPN service itself for security auditing, which are stored safely and automatically erased once every 24 hours.
Speed: 5/5
This is a pretty short section, but I have never experienced bandwidth or throttling issues with this service in the time I’ve used it – outside of any shortcomings of the Wi-Fi to which I was connected. Since they’re a smaller service, they also don’t have to oversell their bandwidth, resulting in a more consistent experience for their users.
User Interface and Experience: 4/5
The UI is user friendly and easy to figure out. The client on both desktop and mobile are both easy to use and are not obnoxious to look at/use. There’s not much else to say about it, but it also didn’t blow me away.
Pricing and payment: 5/5
The price for using this service is extremely affordable. Their yearly plan is $52.20. Usually I do not like to purchase a subscription beyond this amount of time anyway, as legislation can change and policies can vary.
One of the most exciting aspects of VPN.AC is the sheer number of payment options they have, including crypto. They accept all of the major cryptocurrencies, along with my favorite, Dogecoin.
Overall, I really enjoy this service.
