IPVanish VPN Software Review

IPVanish.com is a well known, established player on the VPN market, with a huge number of servers all around the planet and a lot of network experience, being around for over 15 years now.
Even though IP Vanish is based in the United States of America, where the law enforces companies to disclose user information if needed for investigation, the provider states that they don’t store any log files at all. Combined with Bitcoin which is an available payment method for IPVanish customers, their VPN service can be considered anonymous.

That being said, ipvanish.com seems to be a real alternative to other VPN providers that don’t really care about the anonymity of their users. IPVanish therefore is not only a great provider for unblocking websites and video streams that otherwise would be blocked in the users country, but also for filesharing and BitTorrent usage.

IPVanish also offers the possibility to pay via Credit Card and PayPal, but as you already might know: these payment methods are divulging personal information about the customer and shouldn’t be used if anonymity is required.

As with many providers, customers are able to chose their contract duration themselves. There are three different options available: 1 month, 3 months and 1 year. Choosing the longest period of 12 months, customers can save up to 45% compared to the 1 month plan.

As already mentioned, ipvanish.com has a lot of servers all around the globe, being present in 44 countries with a total number of over 100 servers and 7,000 IP addresses available. Customers are able to connect through OpenVPN, PPTP and L2TP with an encryption level depending on the chosen protocol: PPTP is 128-Bit while the others are encrypted with 256-Bit.

These are the countries IPVanish operates servers in:
Belgium, Southafrica, Italy, Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Egypt, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, Kyrgyzstan, Denmark, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Brasil, France, Romania, South Korea, Netherlands, Ukraine, Mexico, Austria, Turkey, Finland, Southafrika, Costa Rica, Slowakia, India, USA, Czech Republic, Canada, China, Norway, Australia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, Spain, Argentina, Portugal, UK, Indonesia, Croatia, Thailand, Saudi-Arabia, Panama and Singapore.

The IPVanish VPN client is pretty feature-rich and modern. It is available for mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads and also for Android phones and tablets. Of course, there are also clients for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

To install the IPVanish client on Windows or Mac OS X, download the automatic setup file from their website first. One great advantage of the IPVanish setup software is the possibility to install everything required – such as the Microsoft .NET Framework – through this one setup process. You don’t have to download anything else, the setup takes care of everything.
After downloading the right setup file, follow the installations on screen and install IPVanish to your device. When the client is installed and launched, you can enter your IPVanish login credentials to connect to a desired server. The software should be started with Administrator privileges on Windows, which can be achieved by right-clicking the .EXE File and choosing “Run as Administrator”.

The software offers a lot of features, which include server selection by speed and location, protocol selection, auto-reconnects and automatic connection on windows startup to a chosen server (such as the fastest one or the last one connected to) and much more. It is also possible to automatically change the IP address after a specified period.
A small disadvantage is the included world map for server selection which loads every time on startup and is slowing down the whole process. The client is not very fast at all.

Setup: https://www.ipvanish.com/vpn-setup/
Windows Setup Guide: https://www.ipvanish.com/visualguides/app/Windows/
Mac OS X Setup Guide: https://www.ipvanish.com/help.php#tabs-3