Free VPN: vpnbook.com Review

Summary
  • 8/10
    Features - 8/10
  • 8/10
    Speed & Reliability - 8/10
  • 6/10
    Security & Privacy - 6/10
  • 6/10
    Usability & Compatibility - 6/10
  • 6/10
    Support & Documentation - 6/10
  • 8/10
    Value for Money - 8/10
7.0/10

Summary

VPNBook offers a very good free VPN service. The speed and functionality surpases even some paid services we have tested out. It's a very promising service that should be more than enough for your daily VPN needs. We were quite impressed with the performance and we hope that they stay on top of their game.

VPN Service Description

VPNBook Free VPN Service describes itself as a privacy-oriented provider, using services designed with the latest and most advanced crypto techniques ”to keep you safe on the Internet from the prying eyes and hackers”. The VPN Service seems anonymous according to domain whois and claims to be based in Switzerland.

UPDATE (11/03/2013): Are you worried that vpnbook.com might be a honeyport or scam service? Here’s our opinion

Features

vpnbook.com offers a hassle-free setup and signup process using a pre-defined generic user name and a password that changes on a regular basis, so the user has to go to their website in order to fetch the new password before connecting to the VPN. Their service is donation and ad-supported.

VPN Book offers free PPTP and OpenVPN services thus making itself compatible with most devices and OSes out there. The setup process is brain-dead simple, the user simply needs to enter the server name, username and password in the connection software bundled with their devices (Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/Symbian etc.) or download the OpenVPN Client. It’s good to see someone provides free OpenVPN access, because it is a lot more secure than PPTP.

VPNBook provides two servers, both in the Europe, hosted in Romania, on the Voxility Newtork (which also hosts a Tor Exit Node – so it is pretty much “abuse” friendly)

UPDATE (05/09/2013): VPN Book added two more servers, one in UK and one in USA. That’s just great if you plan to use it for streaming services. We will try them out and post another update focused on speed

Speed

We tested their server from both E.U. and U.S. Based locations and the results are decent at least, with speed up to 50 Mbit/second from E.U. hosts and up to 20 Mbit/sec download – 7 Mbit/sec upload from U.S. based hosts. More than enough for HD video streaming and such.

As a side note, while they offer two VPN servers, both in Europe, the second one (euro2) is much faster than the first one, probably because most users tend to cram up on that first server. So we suggest you connect to the second server.

Here are some speed results:

Cachefly Speed Tests (download):
test1: 18.5 Mbit/s
test2: 12.6 Mbit/s
test3: 15 Mb/s

Softlayer Speed Tests (download/upload)
test1 (Amsterdam, EU): 24 Mbit/s down and 7.3 Mbit/s up
test2 (Washington, US): 9.26 Mbit/s down and 2.96 Mbit/s up
test3 (Dallas, US): 8.2 Mbit/s down and 2.5 Mbit/s up

OVH Speed Tests (download/upload)
test1: 16 Mbit/s down and 17.45 Mb/s up
test2: 14.68 Mb/s down and 17.37 mb/s up
test3: 11.3 Mb/s down and 16 Mb/s up

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 45ms, Maximum = 78ms, Average = 47ms

Conclusions

VPNBook.com offers a stable, fast and hassle-free service and our tests had shown no major glitches or stability issues. Peering within Europe is very good and we like the fact that they provide OpenVPN. Using Voxility as their hosting provider is also an advantage, since it is an abuse-friendly provider and they likely have more important stuff to do (like dealing with Tor abuse) than monitoring a VPN provider within their network. It gets a 7/10 rating and we highly recommend it for users in Europe.

Share your thoughts if you tried vpnbook!

11 thoughts on “Free VPN: vpnbook.com Review”

  1. Pingback: Free VPN Providers
  2. um from swaziland i was using vpnbook and it was fun i was browsing for free and now my dongle says connection closed by remote computer be4 connetion. I dnt knw whether my service provider has blocked me

    Reply

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