Based in Romania, VPN.ac is a relatively unknown VPN service provider that has been around since 2012. The service comes with a lot of interesting features and security measures. In this review, we will dissect every element and feature provided by VPN.ac. Scroll down for more details.
Price Plans
VPN.ac follows a simple and a straightforward pricing strategy. All users get to enjoy the same features, only the subscription duration differs from one plan to another. There are 4 different price plans available; 1 month for $9, 3 months for $24 ($8 per month), 6 months for $36 ($6 per month) and 1 year for $58 ($4.8 per month).
Payment Methods
A variety of payment options are available to meet everyone’s needs. We were happy to see that VPN.ac relies mostly on Bitcoin as a payment method which is impressive because Bitcoin is a type of anonymous payments that adds extra privacy and security to the user. In addition to Bitcoin, you can pay via PayPal, Alipay, credit/debit cards, iDeal, UnionPay, WebMoney or SEPA Direct Debit. Prepaid voucher cards, Perfectmoney and altcoins are soon to be added.
Free Trial & Refund
We cannot say that paying $2 to get VPN.ac access for a week is a free trial for it is certainly not for free. The company offers 1 week to try their services for $2 with 3 simultaneous connections.
As for refund, you can get a 7-day money-back guarantee full refund if you are not satisfied with the service.
Privacy Policy
VPN.ac has one of the best privacy policies we have come across. The level of transparency and straightforwardness is very good and we highly recommend visiting their privacy policy page to get a full overview of their philosophy. First of all, the company does not keep any of its users’ activity logs as mentioned on their website “we do not log/monitor any kind of user activity such as visited web-sites, emails, files transferred, instant messages, DNS queries etc.” This means that you can use the internet while being connected to VPN.ac without fear of being monitored whether by the VPN service provider or any third party, “nothing is stored on VPN servers, not even common Linux daemon logs like entropy daemons, ntpd, OpenSSH etc”. On the other hand, the only logs kept are connection logs and bandwidth statistics. In addition, the company manages its own DNS servers which adds extra layer of encryption since no third parties are involved in resolving DNS queries at all.
VPN.ac Features
In this section, we will go through all the features provided by VPN.ac, such as: security, encryption protocols, platform compatibility, server locations, bandwidth, customer support, etc. This is to help you decide if this VPN suits your needs.
Security & Encryption
When it comes to security and encryption, these guys clearly know their game. They are proud that they “exclusively use only opensource technologies and all our servers are running Linux.” For OpenVPN, they use AES-256 bit and AES 128-bit encryption with RSA-4096 and Elliptic Curve. The same goes for L2TP/IPsec protocol which is supported by AES-256 bit and AES 128-bit encryption. As for PPTP, it is supported by 128-bit MPPE. However, this protocol is no longer recommended as it has been compromised by the NSA ad can be easily deciphered.
Servers & Bandwidth
It is unclear how many servers they have, but all servers are spread across 21 countries to help users bypass geo-restrictions. It is mentioned that VPN.ac can overcome stubborn firewalls and works very well in China.
As for bandwidth, there are no restrictions over bandwidth nor is there any form of speed throttling. You can find a very bold statement confirming that they are confident enough that your internet connection will not be intentionally throttled by the service.
“We do not oversell bandwidth, nor engage in volume-selling, and more VPN servers are regularly added to ensure against overuse of our locations; at any given time, available bandwidth speed greatly exceeds our users’ needs – usually at least 10-fold”.
Compatibility
VPN.ac is compatible with Windows, iOS, Mac OS and Android. If you want to download it on other platforms, you can check their manual setup tutorials. The VPN is also compatible with several routers, such as: DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, Advanced Tomato, pfSense and AsusWRT/Merlin.
As for port-forwarding, it is not available since it is considered as insecure.
Customer Support
We had our concerns about how we would get support from the website, especially when live chat support is not available. However, the website is one of the most useful and organised websites we have come across. If you have any questions whatsoever about the tiniest detail, you can head over to the F.A.Q page or the Knowledgebase page. They are extremely dedicated to answering all commonly asked question regarding the service. In addition, if you want to communicate with the support team, you can either send an email or a ticket.
Conclusion
We are generally happy that we have stumbled upon this relatively unknown VPN service. We admire their dedication to privacy and level of transparency with customers. It is clear that the company is more about providing a reliable product than selling one. Prices are not bad, we have seen way more expensive VPN services. The website is very professional, easy to navigate and extremely informative. We would like, however, to know the exact number of servers provided. As for the free trial, we wouldn’t call it a free trial if we are going to pay for it even if it is only a couple of bucks. We like the fact that they run and manage their own DNS servers. All in all, we are happy that we have found this VPN service and we can definitely recommend it.
