Private Internet Access
Once great, now mediocre.
AVPN service made popular by its low price, Private Internet Has fallen far since it first rose to prominence a few years ago.
Its success has clearly been its own worst enemy, with notable performance issues on a number of streaming services. On UK services, buffering was a constant issue even in SD, which is not surprising given its extremely low Speedtest.net result of 0.57Mbps. It fared little better connecting to US West, with a download throughput of just 0.63Mbps. Even switching to other servers in the US provided no better results. The best that could be said is that its ping speeds were OK, only about 30ms higher than the baseline.
Given the low speeds, it almost doesn’t matter that both Netflix and Hulu are inaccessible with the service. No amount of hopping between servers could find one that could access either streaming service.
Which is all a shame, because we like its simple interface. It keeps no logs and supports exactly the right kind of security measures that you’d want, including a kill switch, leak protection and anonymous payment systems. It supports PPTP and L2TP for simple setup on third-party devices (though it uses a different password to your main password) and there are guides online for setting it up on a variety of devices — though it should be noted that some of those guides are horribly out of date. There’s even a SOCKS5 proxy available as part of the account for those who just want to use it for anonymous BitTorrenting.
But all that doesn’t make up for the poor speeds and inability to work around geoblocks. Even at the low price, this is not recommended.