HideMyAss! has been a popular independent provider of VPN services since 2005, but is now owned by security giant Avast.
The company offers a vast network of 790+ servers in 280+ locations across 190+ countries, many more than the bulk of the competition.
Some servers are specifically optimized for streaming or P2P, maybe improving performance.
- Want to try HideMyAss? Check out the website here
The HideMyAss! website proudly proclaims that it works on all your devices, and it just might have a point. Not only are there custom apps for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Linux, but there's installation advice to help you manually set up the service on many other platforms. And that includes the ability to configure some routers, which in theory should allow you to use the service with all your smart devices, too.
Getting started with some devices can be tricky, and VPNs are prone to all kinds of other technical issues, but you're not alone. HideMyAss! has plenty of setup and troubleshooting guides and 24/7 support to help point you in the right direction.
Plans and pricing
HideMyAss! pricing is fairly typical for a mid-range VPN: $10.39 (£7.99) per single month, $7.79 (£5.99) per month paid every 6 months, or $6.49 (£4.99) per month on the annual plan. Supported payment methods include cards, PayPal and Skrill.
There are cheaper services around, and for example Private Internet Access costs $3.33 on its annual plan, only $2.91 if you pay for two years up-front. But many of the big-name competitors cost more, with for instance NordVPN's annual plan priced at an effective $6.99 a month, and ExpressVPN charging $8.32.
A 7-day free trial gives you a decent amount of time to trial the service. You must hand over your payment details, and you'll automatically be billed for the annual plan when the trial ends, unless you cancel (which is easy to do online.)
If you buy, and then run into problems, you're protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That has some unusual conditions, though, in particular it's only available if you've used less than 10GB of data and made fewer than 100 connections.
Privacy and logging
HideMyAss! has so much small print that the Legal section has a sidebar with no less than 13 separate sections, and many of those are also very lengthy (the privacy policy alone has more than 3,000 words.)
This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. The main reason for the cluster of documents is that HideMyAss! has moved key sections into separate articles, making them easier to find, and most of these are clearly structured and well written.
While other companies force you to go hunting through the privacy policy for a hint of any logging details, for instance, HideMyAss! gives you all the key points in a dedicated Logging Policy page.
This explains that there's no logging of the resources you access while online, or any of the data sent and received over the VPN.
There is a significant amount of session logging, though. The service records the timestamp of every session connect and disconnect, the IP address you used to connect to the service, the IP address of the VPN server assigned to you, and the amount of data uploaded and downloaded.
Normally, this data will be deleted at the end of the second month after the month it was created. For example, if you had VPN sessions on January 1st and 31st, the data for both would be deleted on 31st March.
But, the company explains:
"If we are notified or determine that your VPN account has been used in breach of our End User Agreement (including our Acceptable Use Policy, e.g. for spamming, file sharing or other illicit activity, then we may store your VPN Data for an extended period of time beyond the normal 3 month maximum."
This kind of session logging won't matter if you're just using the VPN to protect regular internet activities like collecting email or online shopping. But if you're downloading torrents or doing anything else where someone might record and investigate your IP address, it provides a means for them to relate those actions back to your HideMyAss! account, and that could cause problems later.
Apps
Signing up for a HideMyAss! trial works much like any other web service you've ever used. Choose a plan, select a payment method – card, PayPal, Skrill, UnionPay and Neteller are supported – and hand over your money in the usual way.
A Download page pointed us directly to the correct app for our Windows device, while also giving us links to Mac, Android and iOS builds. This isn't as well-presented as high-end competitors such as ExpressVPN - you don't get the same number of tutorials on setting the service up manually, and there's no link to download the Android .apk file for manual installation elsewhere - but it covers the basics well.
The Windows app opened with a very simple interface containing only three tabs, and three buttons.
'Instant Mode' gets you connected to your nearest server for secure browsing; 'Location Mode' enables choosing a specific location, and 'Freedom Mode' helps you connect from a restricted country (Iran, China) to a less regulated location to help unblock websites and news.
A well-designed Location Picker helps you choose nearby servers, P2P or streaming-optimized locations, as well as providing a Favorites list for easy access to commonly-used places. It doesn't provide ping times or server load figures to highlight the fastest or slowest locations, but otherwise works very well.
You're not prevented from choosing a new location while you're connected to another, unlike some more restrictive apps. If you want to switch from the US to the UK, just choose that location in the list and the client reconnects immediately.
An interesting Preferences dialog doesn't allow you to choose any protocol beyond the default OpenVPN, and its kill switch works only for applications, rather than the entire system. This means you must manually specify every application you'd like to be prevented from accessing the internet if the VPN connection drops. Apart from the initial setup hassles, you'll also have to remember to add other apps as required, which isn't exactly convenient.
Fortunately, the client also has some genuinely valuable extras. You don't just get an option to automatically connect to the VPN when you access an insecure wireless network; you can have the client ask you what to do. An unusual IP Shuffle feature periodically changes your IP address, making it even more difficult for others to track what you're doing. And a handy Diagnostics screen displays the OpenVPN connection log, potentially very useful in troubleshooting connection issues.
The Android app has a near identical interface to its Windows cousin, with the same design, the same simple connection modes, and (mostly) the ability to get connected with a couple of taps. The location picker doesn't list P2P servers, but that's not exactly a big deal for a mobile app, and overall it does a reasonable job.
Performance
We began our HideMyAss! performance checks by choosing a small group of test servers: three in the US, three in the UK, two in Europe, and locations in Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea to represent the rest of the world.
Our tests began by connecting to each server in turn, recording the connection time, running a ping check to look for latency issues, and using geolocation to verify that the server was in the location advertised.
There was good news in every area. All servers appeared to be where HideMyAss! claimed they would be; connection times were speedy, even for the most distant locations; ping times lengthened for far-away servers, but no more than we expected, and they didn't reveal any problems.
We moved on to checking the download speeds from our test servers, and again got off to a very positive start. All three of our closest UK servers managed a very consistent 66Mbps, and we couldn't expect much more on our 75Mbps fiber broadband test line. If your connection is faster, you may see better results.
European performance was almost as good, with results typically ranging from 58-65Mbps.
US speeds across all servers was highly variable, with impressive peaks of 60Mbps, and dubious lows of under 15Mbps. The best servers seemed to be consistently fast, though, so if you find and stick with the best performers, this shouldn't be an issue.
Our long-distance locations saw an even wider mix of results, so for example Hong Kong gave us 40Mbps in one test, then 6Mbps in the next. Even that low figure is good enough for basic browsing, of course, and other locations performed much better (our lowest SpeedTest.net score for Australia was 42Mbps.)
There's some scope for improvement, then, but overall HideMyAss! performs better than most, and the service gives you more than enough speed for most applications.
Netflix
Point your browser at the HideMyAss! website and you'll read that the service allows you to "stream your favorite TV shows from wherever you are in the world using one of our dedicated streaming servers." Sounds good, but is it true?
The HideMyAss! Windows client enables filtering its location list to display only streaming servers, and right now there are only two: one in New York, one in London. That's not exactly a lot of choice, and we wondered whether that would make it easier for streaming websites to detect and block them.
Well, it turned out we were wrong. The UK server got us instant access to BBC iPlayer, and the US server not only allowed us to browse US-only YouTube clips, it also got us into the much more heavily-defended US Netflix.
This can change at any time, so it's important to confirm the service still works by testing it from your device and location. But right now, HideMyAss! seems to be very effective at unblocking streaming websites.
Support
The HideMyAss! support site offers a wide range of resources, including setup guides, a searchable knowledgebase, FAQs, a web forum, and 24/7 live chat for anything urgent.
The web content isn't as in-depth or well presented as some of the competition. ExpressVPN has a host of detailed setup guides, all easily accessible in a couple of clicks from the support page. HideMyAss! doesn't organize its articles quite as neatly, and when you do find them, there's less information, and occasionally some questionable points. (The Windows setup tutorial starts by talking about downloading the latest version of the .NET Framework, for instance, before saying there's nothing out of the ordinary about warnings that the TAP driver isn't signed, and recommending you fix this by disabling driver signing checks. This isn't necessarily bad advice if you know what you're doing, but it's also seriously advanced stuff, and we wouldn't expect it to appear in a general installation tutorial for all levels of user.)
The HideMyAss! web forum isn't a busy place, but post a question there and it'll normally be answered by a staff member within a few hours. Replies are generally helpful, and if the problem can't be solved on the forum, the support team will often create a ticket for you or send you a direct email to discuss the issue further.
If you can't wait, live chat is on hand for near instant assistance. We posed a Windows setup question and within a couple of minutes, a support agent began giving us a helpful and accurate solution. That works for us, and overall, we think HideMyAss! should be able to help you solve most common VPN issues.
Final verdict
This service's data collection policies could be a problem for the privacy-conscious. Speeds are good and you do get one of the largest VPN networks around, though, and if these are your priorities HideMyAss! might be worth a try.
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from TechRadar - Technology Reviews https://ift.tt/2rWlPTT
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