Hotspot Shield
A capable VPN that’s expensive compared to most rivals but has a handy free tier
SCORE
PRICE Free; Premium, £11 per month or £84 per year, from hotspotshield.com
Hotspot Shield, formerly part of AnchorFree, has been owned since 2019 by US firm Aura, another VPN and security company that’s actively adding services to its portfolio. It’s probably one of the most widely white-labelled services around; for example, we know it’s the service behind Kaspersky’s Secure Connection VPN. Under previous ownership, the service was found to have leaked users’ real locations, a bug that was rapidly patched.
Hotspot Shield has a limited but useful free tier. It’s ad-supported, gives you 500MB of data per day, and doesn’t require you to log into a Hotspot Shield account. You get access to just one endpoint, in the
USA, but connection speeds, though slowed by contention, are often surprisingly decent, this month sitting solidly at around 30Mbits/sec. The use of personalised ads in the free app also has privacy implications that have, to date, largely gone unaddressed by the firm.
The full version is expensive: about £84 for a one-year account for five simultaneous connections. Aura tries to sweeten the deal with its antivirus suite, a 1Password subscription and Hiya call blocking for your mobile devices, but bundled extras are no reason to subscribe to a VPN.
Hotspot Shield is consistently fast. This month, although we saw Netherlands throughput drop to a below-average 138Mbits/sec, UK and US speeds were both impressive at 278Mbits/sec and 250Mbits/sec respectively. It’s also pretty good at streaming. iPlayer and Disney+ worked for us from dedicated UK and US streaming endpoints, even if Netflix would have none of it in our most recent tests.
The service supports IKEv2/IPSec on iOS and provides OpenVPN configuration files for use with routers and similar devices, but its desktop and Linux command-line client all use the company’s proprietary Catapult Hydra protocol.
This performs well enough, but we’d prefer an open standard.
Hotspot Shield provides access to an impressive number of endpoint locations, has a kill switch, split tunnelling for paying users, proxy plugins for Firefox and Chrome, and obfuscation to help avoid detection of VPN use through deep packet inspection. In short, then, it competently does what you’d expect from a virtual private network, but it isn’t our first choice for privacy, speed or streaming, and the extras that come with expensive paid accounts add more clutter than value.