A VPN, or “virtual private network” for short, is a service that take traffic sent to and from your devices and encrypts it in what’s known as a “tunnel”. Tunnels help to hide the content of your traffic as well as the origin, which makes it almost impossible for anyone from advertisers to hackers to find out who you are or what kind of content you’re looking at on the web. 

Using a VPN is one of the easiest and most surefire ways to jumpstart your digital privacy, and gives you a whole new layer of control over how your personal information is seen and used across the internet. By installing a VPN on your device or even your home’s wireless router, you can guarantee that your data only goes where you want it to, and is only seen by the people who are meant to see it.

Everywhere you go! With many of the most popular VPN providers offering an array of apps and configuration options that let users connect on almost every device ever invented, it’s never been easier to keep yourself and your family protected from internet threats than it is today.

Hackers and advertisers depend on you slipping up on your data protection efforts when you say, switch from your laptop to your phone, but with a VPN that allows for multiple devices on the same account you can be sure that both lines are protected from intrusion 24/7! If you’re browsing at home and want a more reliable way to protect your family’s personal information, installing a VPN on your router and all the devices within range is the best possible way to do it.

And of course one of the most common reasons for using a VPN on the go is to protect your wireless network, which in many cafes like Starbucks can basically be hacked by anyone within range of you and your device. Once hacked, it could only be a matter of minutes before a hacker is stealing your credit card information, home address, or even your social security data.

With a VPN installed you can browse confidently in the knowledge that your provider has got you (and your data’s) back. 

First, it all starts with the new beta HTML5-based speed testing tool over at Speedtest.net. Because HTML5 isn’t crippled by the same limitations as Flash, all the results gathered via this new updated method are proven to be the most accurate taken on any review site to date.

Next, while other review sites might only test their VPNs using a 100Mbps line (some even go as low as 25Mbps), neither one of these speed tiers are able to represent the true capacity of a VPN operating at its peak. In order to get the most accurate results possible we’ve tested every VPN featured on our domain using a fiber optic, 1GB/s simultaneous upload and download line. This means that when we say you’re getting the fastest VPN on the market, you know you’re truly getting the fastest of the fast - no questions asked.

Finally, to increase accuracy even further we then continued to refine our process down to the granular level, guaranteeing the results you see will reflect what you should expect from a provider when connecting from within that country, province, or state. Instead of posting results that reflect how long a packet takes to travel from a VPN server, to the Speedtest.net node, and then back to our local testing location in Portland, Oregon (as all other review sites have), we found the fastest server located in each city and test from there.

Once the VPN is connected to the fastest server in a specific region, we then run six tests in total to determine the overall average. The first three are dry runs which connect to the closest server here in Portland, designed to gather data for a control of what the unrestricted non-VPN speed looks like at the hour we tested locally.

Next we run the VPN test itself, which again consists of three back-to-back tests from the same server. After the results are in we average them together and that brings us to the final result!

VPN Company Snapshot: This section contains a brief overview of the company, containing information that ranges from their social media presence down to the ratings they’ve received for various apps across different devices. This is a general overview of how visible and how well liked a company is by their users, and is designed to give you a good first glimpse into how well their VPN stacks up against the competition. 

Speed Review: In our eyes, this is the probably the single most important metric that any prospective VPN buyer should be aware of when making their final decision. No one wants to spend hours waiting for a video to load or have their game lag out at the last second, which is why it’s imperative that every VPN we recommend is at the top of its game when it comes to pumping out raw, unchecked bandwidth every hour of the day. 

The numbers you see on the spreadsheet represent the three-test average taken at 6AM for their respective locations. At the bottom you’ll also find the number of locations, servers, and IP addresses each VPN offers, which can be important if you live in a more remote region of the world and need a VPN that has servers in your country. We recommend finding the country that’s closest to where you live and using the fastest results from that region to help you decide which VPN is right for you in this category.

We would also like to note that this is an ongoing, time-consuming process, and while in a perfect world we would like to have tested every VPN on the web by launch, for now we have results posted for the 25 most requested VPNs with plans to expand that list to the full 200 over the next few months. With such a rigorous testing process in place it can be difficult to gather results in bulk, but we are working every day to get this list as complete as possible in a timely fashion for the benefit of all our readers around the globe. 

Ease of Use Review: Ease of Use applies to how simple a VPN is to use on any device. Is the UI intuitive? How many extra features are available? Was the connection process quick or slow? How many languages do they support?If you’re tired of waiting around on sluggish, buggy VPN apps and want to find out which ones work the best and come with the most extra features, this is the section you should keep an eye on the most.

Security Review: This is where we start getting down to brass tacks. The Security Review section covers everything you need to know about how safe a VPN can keep your connection. From the number of security protocols offered to their data logging policies, this section is where every VPN gets their feet put to the fire on just how secure their secure connection really is.  If you’re someone who’s concerned about how much data your VPN provider collects on you, where their headquarters are located, or whether or not they’re in a country that is subject to Five/Fourteen Eyes jurisdiction, this is the section for you. 

Support Review: Support Review is a brief, but still very important section where we cover all the different support options offered by various VPN providers. Here you can find data on what kind of contact options a VPN offers, what kind of hours they keep, and how extensive their knowledgbase/FAQ are in case no one is around to answer your question the minute you have it.

Device Support: Device Support is probably our most self-explanatory section, as it offers exactly that: a list of which devices each VPN currently supports. If you want to have a VPN installed on every device in your home (and the wireless router they’re all connected to), try and find one that has the most “Yes” boxes ticked throughout the whole column. 

Pricing Review: Finally there’s the Pricing Review section, which to many budget users is easily the most important of all. Our readers can use this section to get a full snapshot of all the different prices and membership tiers that a particular provider offers, and immediately compare them against other competing VPNs by scrolling through each row.

This is also where you can find out which payment options a provider offers, with the most vital data point for anonymous users to keep an eye on being whether or not they accept cryptocurrencies. If you really want to keep yourself secure and privacy is one of your biggest reasons for getting a VPN in the first place, then being able to pay with a currency like Bitcoin is the best way to make sure that no one is ever able to trace your IP or your identity back to the VPN or the sites you visit while using their service.  (Prices in sheet reflective of data gathered for December 2017)

So why go to all this fuss, you might ask? Because no one else has.  For years the VPN industry has been allowed to run amok with public opinion, paying however many advertising dollars were necessary to give them the most visibility over the competition on top ranking keywords and lists. This approach has stymied innovation and caused these companies to spend more on marketing than they do on research and development - and we’re setting out to change that. 

Using our system of data collection, research, and speed testing we’ve assembled the most comprehensive list of metrics to measure every VPN in the industry against. This means that for any results we rank near or at the top of their respective categories, you know they’ve actually earned that spot instead of just shelling out extra advertising dollars for it instead.  Unbiased, uninfluenced, and 100% transparent - these are the pillars of VPN.com that we believe make it the #1 source on the web for everything you need to know about VPNs in 2018!