The VPN market is huge and it is showing no signs of slowing down, thanks to the ever intrusive “Privacy Policies” of companies. Initially, VPNs were thought of as tools only for tech-savvy people. The importance of protecting your identity online was not given much thought but the realization did not take much time to occur. Since then, the market has been flooded with different VPN services which aim to protect your identity as you browse the internet. Today we will take a look at Hola VPN, which takes a different approach to solve the users’ peril.
What is a VPN and why do you need it?
A ‘Virtual Private Network’ (VPN) is like a private network that protects your identity online. It hides your IP address and makes your actions online untraceable. The secure and encrypted connections make it better than a secured Wi-Fi hotspot. Data is the new oil and everyone wants to get as much information as they can out of a person browsing the internet. Every other day the congress is grilling the CEOs of tech giants over their “Privacy Policy” which most of the time does not ensure privacy. This triggers the need for a VPN service that protects the identity of a person online.
Speed
Speed is very important when choosing a VPN and we ran extensive tests to find out the speed.
We started from a 30 Mbps connection from India and used the Hola VPN app to connect to the nearest location to run the speed tests. Then we connected to servers in different countries and ran speed tests at various locations and various times to see if the speed varied over time. The speeds were good for a VPN, we got 10 Mbps across the United States, in India we got 24 Mbps with our nearest server and in the UK we got a speed of 20 Mbps. We tested the VPN on another network that had almost 200 Mbps download speed which was connected to the USA server. The VPN clocked a speed of 150Mbps, which is commendable. However, the ping was very high which resulted in barely usable browsing. The speed also varied significantly in a time period of a week, the variation was also large, for example, the speeds in the UK ranged from 6 Mbps to 20 Mbps (more than 300% difference). The United States wasn’t far behind with speeds between 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps (200% difference). The speeds in India did not fluctuate. The only positive thing was the connection reliability, which was good.
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Pricing
Hola VPN has 3 tiers, namely the Pro, Premium, and Ultra. The Pro is free to use and Premium and Ultra are billed at $7.49 and $29.99 for a month respectively. The prices drop down significantly when billed yearly at $3.89 for Premium and $19.99 for the Ultra for a month.
That’s a beefy 35% discount for the people who commit for the long term. Choose the 3-year plan and the monthly charges are lower than your cup of coffee, at $1.49 and $7.99 for the Premium and the Ultra, Hola VPN provides the maximum value out of all leading VPNs.
Price should not be the only measuring stick for a VPN, providing a great service should be the priority for anyone looking for a VPN service. Hola VPN, in its almost a decade of existence, has continuously provided top-tier service to its 180 million customers all over the world. In case you are not convinced about the kind of service you get, Hola has a 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked.
Torrenting
As we would have hoped, Hola works fine with all the major torrent sites. We tried to log on to the websites with different servers and we were able to access them without any issues whatsoever.
Hola does not limit the access to the sites from selected and often overloaded servers. You can choose any server from the entire roster of servers to access the sites, and there is no data cap either.
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As expected, the downloads were fast and there were no hassles either. As far as torrenting is concerned, Hola is good!
Privacy
A VPN should not only protect your identity and actions but also safeguard your information online. Hola VPN fares well in the privacy test, the 256-bit AES Encryption keeps your data secure but Hola does not fare well in the Logging aspect. Hola has been in the crosshairs for a long time, with people claiming it logs information of the user. Some even said that Hola was storing more information than any other VPNs and that was bringing the rating down for the service.
Hola says that it does keep logs of the user and might share the information with the authorities if the user is flagged for suspicious activity. The website also mentions that in its existence which has spanned for almost a decade they have not come across any user who has done any malicious activity.
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This does put Hola at a disadvantage against other VPNs.
List of Servers
The range of available servers is vast and it is unlikely that you’ll run out of options when it comes to accessing your desired website. Netflix is notorious for its VPN blocking but Hola VPN had no issues whatsoever connecting to the site. The confidence of the developers is also reflected by the fact that once you connect to the server, Netflix is one of the sites that come as a suggestion below.
Set-up
Windows
Setting up the VPN is fairly easy. Once you log into your account on the site, it will redirect you to the download page from where you can download the Hola VPN application. After installing, you will see the location of the server you will connect to and a drop-down menu presents the location of all the servers available. The list is extensive and you will not have any issues connecting to the site of your choice.
iOS
After you install the Hola VPN app from the AppStore, you are asked to give permissions to the app to make modifications to the connection and once you do it, you can connect to the server of your choice from the list of countries available.
The speeds on iOS are similar to the ones achieved on Windows and the connection reliability is stellar. The ping, on the other hand, makes the browsing experience close to unbearable at times.
macOS
The setup is similar to its counterparts, once you are done with the installation you can choose the server of your choice and click on the Power on the button over the server name and you’re ready to go.
