Get 500GB+ dedicated bandwidth a month with your own VPN server
Sign up with VPN businesses and you’ve no idea how active their servers might be. Is there sufficient bandwidth for everybody or will performance fall to a crawl at times? There is no way.
The Dedicated VPN plan of swiss-based VPNBook offers you a dedicated VPN server with CPU time, memory and 500GB+ monthly bandwidth. The idea is that you’re online, you prevent the bottlenecks of the competition, and get consistent speeds.
So expect to invest some time setting up your apparatus vPNBook doesn’t have any apps. There are setup manuals for Mac Windows, iOS and Android and you can join up to five of your devices.
VPNBook offers servers in four places: US West, US East, Canada and the Netherlands. If you require P2P, the list gets shorter, as it’s only supported on the servers that are Canadian. And keep in mind that once you’ve chosen you can’t switch afterwards, if the VPN does not provide you access to a blocked site which might be a problem.
As you may expect a dedicated VPN to be costly, VPNBook’s offering is actually cheaper than some standard plans at only $7.95 per month. There are no long-term commitments or setup fees required, if things don’t workout and a 30-day money-back guarantee is offered by the company.
Privacy
VPNBook doesn’t seem to have a Privacy Policy for its own commercial support alone, but there’s a simple webpage covering its free accounts, and although this is quite basic, it gives some helpful information.
This starts with a statement that:”we don’t collect any private information or keep any user’s internet data”; the company isn’t logging your internet actions.
It goes :”The only thing that we log is that the IP address and time the connection was made”; there’s some session logging. Because this is a dedicated VPN merchandise, VPNBook will always know the server you’re accessing, and that means it’s likely to possess the information required to link an internet actions back to your account.
The policy explains:”We log link data so as to cut down abusive activities and keep this free VPN service online for all valid users” This affirms the logging’s purpose would be to detect and deal with’violent actions’; if someone records your IP address and fretting to VPNBook about something you have done, the business will be able to identify and cope with you.
How will you get taken care of? “Should you abuse the system, your IP will be banned”, states the policy. That’s just for the service, but we’d assume that in the event you abuse the system it wills probably close down.
Installation
Getting started with VPNBook is very simple, at least originally. Choose a location, hit Subscribe, decide on a payment system (card or PayPal) and finish the transaction. We were done in around 30 seconds.
The process then grinds to an immediate halt, though, since the website explains that:”We will set up your committed VPN server and email you the login information within 1 business day.”
We can understand why establishing the Dedicated service of VPNBook requires more work and possibly must be carried out manually, but this ought to be spelled out more clearly on the site. But if a customer gets an email indicating it may not be ready for three days that are about, also purchases a waiter on Friday evening, we guess they’re likely to be disappointed.
In our case, an email arrived around eight hours afterwards, with basic login information: OpenVPN and PPTP usernames and passwords, along with a few OpenVPN profiles (TCP using port 443, and UDP using port 53).
There were no particulars, not the town or country where the server was found. If servers were arranged by you there’s no way to tell which credentials correspond to which nation.
You may have expected the email would include a link to the support pages of VPNBook, or even some setup advice of its own. But no, you are left to figure it out on your own, so we headed off to the VPNBook website to explore its installment guides.
These were quite limited, with only two collections of tutorials: one on setting up OpenVPN connections on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Ubuntu, and another covering setup PPTP on Windows, Ubuntu and Android.
Even this tiny selection had not been maintained. The PPTP links for Windows 10 and Ubuntu were broken, giving us a’not found’ error.
Another tutorials don’t possess the depth or extent that you would see with a leading supplier like ExpressVPN. Forget history details, troubleshooting advice or any useful additional information: everything you get is a sequence of screenshots, with key regions of the screen highlighted (click here, click that).
None of this will probably be much of a issue if you have put up OpenVPN GUI or any other app before, but VPN newbies might want there was a little more guidance. Keep in mind that there is no 24/7 live conversation if you would like to ask a question, expect to fill out a web form, and then be waiting in 1 business day for a reply’.
We signed up for one in Canada, 2 servers and also one in US East. VPNBook does not get any more special than this, but our Canadian server appeared to be in Burnaby (east of Vancouver, north of Seattle), while our US server was in New York.
Both servers tried using their local Netflix, but without success — that the website spotted what we do and displayed its standard’you seem to use an unblocker or proxy’ message. That is bad news, particularly when you’re purchasing access to a server that is dedicated, until you find one which works, as you can not keep switching locations.
Performance was below average with US rates and Canada fractionally reduced at 16-20Mbps. That’s disappointing: VPNBook claims choosing you improved functionality will be bought by a dedicated account, but in fact you’re getting perhaps the rate you’d expect from a quality VPN.
Last verdict
No apps a small number of places, sluggish rates — VPNBook does not have the performance, the features or the resources to make this work, although there is nothing wrong with dedicated VPNs as a concept. You will get results that are improved enrolling for a normal account with a VPN.
