Ivacy

CHEAP AND FEATURE-RICH, BUT THE SUPPORT SYSTEM AND PERFORMANCE ARE ISSUES.

ALTHOUGH ITS MONTHLY charge is high, the annual charge for Ivacy is one of the most affordable around, working out at just US$2.50 per month, which seems like an absolute bargain for a service that that can still offer Netflix US support and has OK speeds. Connecting to a Los Angeles server, we hit just over 7Mbps in speedtest.net.

As with most Netflix-capable providers, you will need to speak to the support staff to find a server; unfortunately, they’re not available to chat 24/7. Instead you have to go through an email ticketing system and replies can take 24 hours or more to come through, which is frustrating as hell. We finally got a Netflixcapable server, and that server turned out to be too slow for fluid usage with drops to low-res and the occasional stop-and-buffer.

That said, the client is a highlight of the service, with most of the options you’d want, including a kill switch and the ability to sort servers by type (which can point you quickly to BitTorrent-optimised servers, for example).

It also has one thing we’ve seen in no other client: split tunnelling, which lets you specify apps that don’t use the VPN — which can be really useful for things like local email servers.