VPN comparison 11/8/2013
Today we did a quick test between three VPN providers, IPVanish, HideMyAss and Overplay. These are three of the most respected players in the market, and we decided to put them to the test, using a handy online tool speedtest.net.
Testing methodology
Each time we ran the test we took the following steps :
- Full reset of our WiFi router
- Full reboot our computer (Apple Mac 10.8.4 Mountain Lion)
- Checked the non-VPN enabled speed with Speedtest.net
- Enabled the VPN and tested the specific VPN service with the nearest server to use with Speedtest.net
For completeness we ran the tests 5 times, and picked the medium value returned. We also cycled the tests, so not to run them all at the same time. Of course this is just a snapshot view, but our results may be of interest to you if you are considering purchasing a VPN.
Base connection
Our connection is rated for 18 Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up. This can vary through out the day, but this is the benchmark we were starting from. Here is the average result we got for our connection . 14.8 Mb/s down , 1.09 Mb/s up and a ping of 29 ms.
IPVanish connection
A relatively new service to us, is IPVanish , who had some of the lowest pings when we tested. We saw as low as 44 ms, but here is the average of 5 results.
SpeedTest.net gave them an overall B grade for this tested server. 11.83 Mb/s down , 0.93 Mb/s up and a ping of 77ms.
Overplay connection
We have been a customer of Overplay for almost 2 years now, and we are generally pretty happy with the service they provide.
SpeedTest.net gave them an overall grade of C- for this tested server. There average speed was the best we found today.
HideMyAss connection
There is a lot of hype about the HideMyAss VPN connection. But
SpeedTest.net gave them an overall grade of C- for this tested server. One of our tests for HMA returned this less than impressive result, this goes to show that all services have the hick-ups from time to time.
Differentiating VPN services
Measuring and comparing VPN services is not as straight forward as one might think. There are numerous reasons as to why a connection may not be a top performer, like the level load currently on that server, the distance that server is from your location. Our tests really show that there isn’t too much of a difference between the 3 players. When it comes to pricing, they are also around the same $10 mark (€7.50 at today’s exchange rate) . In fact we struggled to find differentiating points based on the service they provide.
We’ve found that IPVanish are particularly helpful with support and their response time to our questions was the shortest. The best we can say is that you will be
VPN comparison 11/8/2013,