VPN4All is one of the few big VPN providers that I had not tried yet, it attracted me that they are located offshore, a loosely used term, offshore literally means in a foreign country,VPN4All offshore location is to be found in the privacy friendly Seychelles, a sovereign archipelago of islands with 85.000 habitants in the Indian Ocean. Seychelles privacy laws make it very difficult for its government and banks to share information with other countries about companies there, it is a place often used to establish companies in secrecy as there are no requirements for shareholders to be listed in the registry, local laws do not require VPN providers to keep logs either, and VPN4All claims to have turned off logging in all of their servers, they textually mention in their privacy policy that “any requests by law enforcement can be met without providing any information about clients or their data. Even a court order would not provide any personal data about users.”
Their VPN software runs on Windows and Mac, Linux computers could use PPTP, but it is not as secure, the mobile version of VPNAll can be used on the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Mobile. Running a VPN on a mobile device will encrypt Instant Messenger chat communications and Voice over IP calls besides hiding your IP when connecting to the Internet.
Offshore VPN provider VPN4All on my NASA wallpaper
I was very pleased with the VPN client highly configurable options, encryption is set up at the highest possible level, AES256 and RSA2096bits key, the interface and installation is multilingual, you can choose in between English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, German and others. At the moment of writing, VPN4All has VPN servers in Finland, Seychelles, USA, UK, Canada, Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Hong Kong and a long etc, over 50 VPN servers with thousands of IPs.
Being myself on a home 6MB Internet connection in Europe I was able to get a little over 4MB in their USA servers with a 150ms ping, the closer European servers at their lowest load gave me my full ISP speed. I contacted VPN4All support a couple of times, once opening a ticket which was replied to me in under 24 hours and the other time using their online live chat which was answered by a friendly support team member in just a few minutes.
In countries in which there is more than one server they can be found spread out, along the US West and East coast and UK South and North for example, this is obviously advantageous. You can also select a special test TCP server from the list to make sure that no firewall is blocking your traffic and troubleshoot problems, VPN4All states that they will go as far as using Teamviewer to help you out if necessary, the VPN client comes with a clear to understand offline manual with screenshots, but I did not have to use it.
VPN4All connection
To send email via SMTP you can whitelist a mail server adding it to the VPN client email options. During the time I have been using this VPN service I did not experience any disconnection issues, a green/red icon located in the Windows toolbar allows you to quickly see the VPN connection state.
The good stuff
The VPN can be set up to always use a static IP (fixed) if you wish so, right clicking on the server and choosing “Anchor IP“, from then on the selected server will show a blue Anchor, this is useful to stop certain websites from blocking people out of their accounts when they detect the IP has changed, like for example Paypal. In the settings one can choose to do exactly the opposite and instruct the VPN client to automatically rotate the computer IP every hour, 30min, 5min. If you have a favourite server it is possible to bookmark it in the drop down list, it will then appear with a yellow star next to it.
A small green bar appears next to each server allowing you to see the load in real time, a common problem with VPN providers owning multiple servers is that you have to waste time swapping servers once you realise the one you have chosen is too slow, with VPN4All you will always be able to get onto the best performing server, a green arrow automatically indicates the fastest VPN for your location, and if any of the servers goes temporarily offline, it will be greyed out from the list, server load can also be seen using the control panel through your VPN4All web account.
VPN4All running on mobile device
The bad stuff
The file sharing unlimited bandwidth package pricing is on the high side, however the VPN4All 50GB/month package is acceptable and buying a yearly account gives you an ample discount, mobile licenses for smartphones need to be bought separately. There is a problem with some servers identifying themselves as being located somewhere else due to server registration details being used by websites to identify location, this problem is common in all VPN providers I have used before but VPN4All has a slight above the average rate.
Conclusion VPN4All
If you are after a VPN with a solid no logging privacy policy located outside US and European Union jurisdiction look no further than VPN4All. If you need a VPN provider that will give you a choice of static or dynamic IPs for web surfing and watching online TV with servers worldwide for a reasonable price and good 24/7 support, VPN4All will do that nicely, but test the VPN first if you badly want a location, just to make sure that it is really showing to websites as being located there. I have used this VPN widely to watch US and UK online TV with no problems, though. There is a 30 money back guarantee (subjected to 100MB usage) that should give you piece of mind.
The big selling point of this VPN over others is the headquarters location in a country with strong privacy laws (Seychelles), dozens of worldwide servers, and a free static IP throw into the package. I give this VPN a personal score of 8 out of 10, once they solve the VPN server geolocation ID problem they should be entitled to a 10 out of 10.
Special discount: VPN4All is now kindly offering a 15% discount to anyone who enters the word hacker10 at the checkout! This code can be used to buy an already discounted yearly package too.
