A VPN which specialises in protecting P2P users
Many VPN companies avoid talking about P2P as far as you can, even if they support it: with the possible legal hassles, it’s presumably simpler to say nothing in any way.
BTGuard is extremely different, though, proudly heading its website with a supply of’Anonymous BitTorrent Services.
BTGuard’s website offers hardly any details on its own VPN service because there’s not much to talk about. There are not any clients to pick from, and just 3 locations to check out, for example: the Netherlands, Singapore and Canada. (Even these aren’t what they seem, but more about that later.)
Wish to try BTGuard? Check out the website here
Assessing the website doesn’t give us the feeling. As we write, the website copyright message is dated 2014. The terms of service page has been last upgraded in 2011. The previous post on the news site of the support site was made on November 12, 2013. There’s little sign of activity or life.
The pricing isn’t very enticing, either, with single-month subscriptions costing a chunky #8 ($10.14), falling to #6 ($7.61) on the annual plan. Keep in mind that major providers such as CyberGhost and NordVPN offer a vastly more competent service for $3 a month or less, if you are eager to sign up for a couple of years.
Still, BTGuard asserts to have an extremely network, together with 10Gbit servers and unlimited rates, and the focus on support that is P2P of the company might encourage you to give them a chance.
Privacy
The privacy policy of bTGuard is short at under 250 words, and this one has gone a bit too far, although we’d normally say contracts that are shorter are greater.
There are a few direct statements. The front page informs us that there are”no records of usage saved”, the privacy policy claims that the company”DOES NOT collect your Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or client use”. That seems positive, but it’s difficult to tell for certain, since there are no definitions of terms.
There are a few definite statements on how BTGuard manages your data, at least, including:”We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to other companies.”
But sometimes it will get somewhat obscure:”We will collect and use of private information exclusively with the objective of fulfilling these goals defined by us and for other compatible purposes, unless we get the consent of the individual concerned or as required by legislation.” Are you convinced you could list everything this allows the company? We’re not.
Setup
We hadn’t been impressed with BullGuard so far, as well as the picture lasted when we tried to register, and the website told us our passwords could only contain numbers and letters : logos are not permitted. Uh, what? Many websites insist on adding symbols to boost security, but BTGuard does not even support them? That doesn’t give a good impression of the experience of the company.
Payment is straightforward, at the least. There is no direct support for card payments, however you can pay by Bitcoin and PayPal.
BTGuard does not have any customers, but a support page points one to OpenVPN and PPTP installation tutorials for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, routers and much more. It has a’last modified’ date of 22nd July 2015, also, which is very up to date by BTGuard criteria.
There’s a distinct lack of information. Many VPN providers believe PPTP an insecure protocol that it is no longer supported by them, however, the BTGuard page does not mention any safety issues, and as it’s easier to set up if anything advocates PPTP.
The installation tutorials will point you in the ideal direction, but they are generally quite basic, a couple of lines of text and only a handful of screenshots.
The Windows OpenVPN installation manual does include one bonus that is small. Instead of having to download BTGuard configuration files and move them in the folder that is right, it provides. This can break quite easily – if OpenVPN is installed in anything aside from location and its default driveway, it’ll fail – but the company is attempting to help.
Performance
BTGuard has no clients of its own, so we opted to install OpenVPN GUI on our Windows 10 system. This was simple and simple, and within a few minutes we were prepared to test the connections of BTGuard.
We started by disconnecting, connecting to a BTGuard server, then checking the OpenVPN logs for any details regarding encryption or security issues. And there was lots to see, with warnings that the setup document hadn’t defined any server certificate verification method, utilized only TLSv1 to affix the control channel (more up-to-date VPNs utilize TLS 1.2), and apparently employed a cipher using a 64-bit block dimensions (it ought to be 256-bit, and would be with just about anybody else.
Our link was still encrypted, and some other hackers hanging around the wireless hotspot would be able to see what you were doing. But the degree of safety was poor, and far inferior to what you would expect from a VPN.
Another major problem arose, also, when we realized the Singapore place was established in the Netherlands (or possibly Germany), and coming Netherlands IP addresses. We could find a way to excuse that if the company has it’s more of an issue.
We tried to get Netflix, hoping to check if it would detect our VPN and joined to Netherlands servers and BTGuard’s Canada. When we were connected to BTGuard as the Netflix website would not even load this was not possible, sadly. Perhaps it was a temporary problem and we’d have better luck at some other time, but provided the other troubles of BTGuard, we doubt that.
The issues continued together with all our performance tests to the finish. The Canada location of BTGuard averaged, although the Netherlands server performed at 65-70Mbps. We may live with this from a VPN that is free, but not a service rather expensive.
Last verdict
When a VPN has just three places, and then turns out to be deceiving you over one of these, you understand this is bad. Factor in the poor website, the absence of customers, the inadequate OpenVPN encryption installation, and the high cost, and we’d ramp up our BTGuard verdict to’terrible.’ Avoid.
