PureVPN is in business since 2006 and is one of the older VPN providers on the market. The Hong Kong based company started early with a lot of servers and kept growing ever since. Today, they operate over 300 servers in 44 countries, making 40,000+ IP addresses available for their customers.
Their servers are located in these countries: Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Panama, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, Ukraine and the USA.
Their VPN service is available in all major protocols which are OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP and even SSTP and IKEv2. Then encryption is a bit low with only 128-Bit SSL available.
The prices are pretty fair, especially if you chose the 12 months plan with which you can save 65% in comparison to the 1 month plan that costs around 7 US Dollars. They accept a big number of different payment methods, with the most valuable, anonymous one: Bitcoin. Customers can also pay with pretty unknown services such as EPrePag, SanalPara, Posta Ceki, ToditoCash, Fortumo, MikroÖdeme and many more. Standard payment options such as PayPal and Credit Card are of course available, too.
Besides the possibility to pay with Bitcoins, PureVPN has some other great advantages: Users can login multiple times with one account (up to 5 connections) and each user gets his own IP address assigned. There are special modes for Video Streaming and much more features included in their own VPN software, which is available for Mac OS and Windows as well as for iOS and Android.
PureVPN has some disadvantages aswell. The most critical aspect is the fact that they keep detailed logfiles. This means, that even though you can pay anonymously via Bitcoin transaction, you cannot gain real anonymity through their VPN service. PureVPN is great for unblocking websites and video streams for sure, but when it comes to filesharing, we can’t recommend this provider.
Their VPN client comes along with some neat features, like the already mentioned country selection. Users can also change the used protocol within the software. Theres also a feature called “split tunneling”, which allows to have different configurations for specified applications. This comes in handy if only some applications should use the VPN connection while others go online directly and therefore may have better speeds.
The software can also be setup to reconnect automatically when the connection is lost and to connect automatically on system start up. The most useful feature might be the “Internet Kill Switch” option, which stops all internet activity in case of a VPN disconnect.
PureVPN also offers a slightly different version of their client to use while in China.
The software is clearly arranged and has a good and clean interface design, it is easy to use and a great help for inexperienced users to establish a VPN connection fast. The different menu sections can be navigated through a tab-styled sidebar. It reminds of other VPN clients like the one from HideMyAss.
To make use of the PureVPN software, an account is needed. The installation process is very simple, just follow the setup steps. After the client is installed, user credentials have to be entered to connect to a VPN server. Once this has been managed, the service is ready to be used.
Windows: https://www.purevpn.com/vpn-software-for-windows.php
Mac OS X: https://www.purevpn.com/vpn-software-for-mac.php