One of the best gaming VPNs.
All of these features, however, come at a price. IPVanish is one of the more expensive VPNs. It offers three plans: it costs $10 per month if you sign up for one month, $8.99 a month for three months, or $6.49 a month for one year. It offers a seven-day money-back guarantee to let you try the service. Payment options include Credit card, PayPal and Bitcoin. For any of these plans, you can use up to five devices simultaneously. IPVanish supports Windows PCs, Macs, Linux, Chromebooks and has mobile apps for Android and iOS. It can even be installed on some routers.
Features
iPVanish’s desktop app is well designed and easy to use. Like the other VPNs I tested, IPVanish lets you choose a particular server to connect to or have it automatically connect to what it deems the best connection. It has more than 750 servers in 60 countries.
You can browse the list of servers by country and for each, the IPVanish desktop client reports an estimated ping and load to help you find a fast server. The desktop app lets you sort the list by country, response time, and load. I was disappointed, however, to find that the response time and load sorting options didn’t seem to work in my testing. I couldn’t sort the list by any other way than country. There is a map view, however, which is helpful for finding a server. Unlike the sort feature, the filters for VPN protocol, latency, and country worked as advertised. IPVanish supports OpenVPN, PPTP, and L2TP protocols.
In settings, you can enable the kill switch that shuts down your Internet connection if the VPN gets disconnected and have IPVanish change your IP address every 45, 60, or 90 minutes. IPVanish allows for anonymous BitTorrenting but Netflix is blocked.
Performance
Routing your Web traffic through a server adds a detour that can slow down the speed of your network connection, but in some circumstances it can actually improve your ping by connecting you to a fast server close to the gaming server. Your mileage will inevitably vary, depending on your location and the location of the gaming server to which you are connected.
To test the performance of IPVanish, I ran the SpeedOf.Me test to measure download and upload speeds, and also played League of Legends to check the VPN’s effect on my ping in a real-world multiplayer setting. For both tests, when I connected to IPVanish, I let it pick the server. I live in southern New Hampshire; it chose a server in New York.
Of the four VPNs I tested with SpeedOf.Me (the fifth, WTFast, only focuses on optimizing game traffic, so the speed test doesn't apply), IPVanish had the second fastest download and upload speeds and was tied for the fastest ping.
Without a VPN connection, SpeedOf.Me reported a download speed of 250.82Mbps and an upload speed of 12.99Mbps. With IPVanish connected, the download speed dropped to 93.30Mpbs and the upload speed fell to 11.94Mbps. Only Private Internet Access was faster, with a download speed of 126.53Mbps and an upload speed of 11.95Mbps.
With League of Legends, I had an average ping of 43ms without a VPN, which is very fast and does not leave much room for improvement. With IPVanish, my ping dropped but one millisecond to 44ms. Three of the four VPNs I tested stayed very close to my baseline ping of 43ms but none improved upon it. WTFast also had a ping of 44ms while Private Internet Access had a ping of 46ms, ExpressVPN’s had a ping of 47ms, and Keep Solid VPN Unlimited had a ping of 65ms. And just another reminder that these results, as impressive as they are, may vary based off your location and specific circumstances.
To test IPVanish’s performance on a more distant and extreme connection, I played League of Legends again, but this time in its Oceania region where my baseline ping was 246ms. On this test, only WTFast was able to improve my ping -- and only slightly to 241ms. I let IPVanish choose the best server in Australia, and it had the second-fastest ping on this test at 251ms.
Comments
Post a Comment