Virtual Private Networks take go enormously popular, compelling VPN providers to go bigger and better with their products lest they be lost among the contest. Trust.Zone, notwithstanding, is not that kind of VPN visitor. While it offers affordable pricing and turns in decent results in our speed tests, it has a small server network, you go only three licenses with a subscription, and information technology only offers a customer for Windows—and a so-so 1 at that. The best VPNs we've tested, NordVPN, Individual Internet Access, and TunnelBear VPN, offering more.
What Is a VPN?
The threats online are many and manifest. Three-alphabetic character intelligence agencies gobble up all the traffic they can, while advertisers seek to track your movement across websites to sell you a new chair. Attackers might exist lurking on public Wi-Fi networks, or fifty-fifty impersonating trusted Wi-Fi networks, to steal your passwords and sensitive information. Thankfully, in that location are VPNs.
If that all sounds too unlikely to be a real danger, consider that the biggest threat to your privacy is probably your ISP. Congress has given the thumbs-up to internet providers to sell anonymized data near their users, which ways you. If that makes you feel gross, consider calling your elected representative—correct after y'all get yourself a VPN.
A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a server controlled by the VPN company. All your spider web traffic is routed through the tunnel, which keeps prying eyes out. Even clever attackers on your network, or in control of your network, won't be able to get a peek.
With a VPN, you tin can spoof your location by selecting a distant VPN server, or tunnel past local censorship. For those reasons, VPNs take long been the tools of journalists and political dissidents operating in repressive countries. You tin use those same properties for a more entertaining purpose past unlocking streaming services with a VPN. That said, companies such equally Netflix have become quite adept at blocking VPNs and practise so with vigor. It'southward upward to you to research what terms of services or fifty-fifty local laws yous might exist breaking by doing and then, however.
It's of import to understand that VPNs aren't a magic bullet. If you lot're connecting to a site that doesn't use HTTPS, your traffic volition no longer be encrypted subsequently it leaves the VPN server. And while VPNs do provide a measure of anonymity by routing your traffic to a VPN server (and lumping it in with everyone else using that server), you need a tool like Tor to really hide your identity online.
Pricing and Features
A subscription from Trust.Zone costs $6.99 per month, putting it well beneath the $10.38 per month boilerplate of PCMag'southward top-rated VPNs. In fact, you won't find many less expensive VPNs. Individual Internet Admission is $6.95 per month, and Norton Wi-Fi Privacy a mere $iv.99 per month.
That said, Trust.Zone only offers iii simultaneous connections with its base subscription, and so while you may be paying less, yous're also getting less. The industry average is 5, putting Trust.Zone well behind the competition. You can upgrade to five simultaneous connections with Trust.Zone, but it will cost y'all $3.99 more per month, which actually puts it a little chip above the average price for five licenses per month. NordVPN offers six connections, CyberGhost offers seven connections, and TorGuard lets customers apply a slider to choose the number of simultaneous connections at checkout.
As with other VPN companies, Trust.Zone offers discounts if you opt for longer subscriptions. You lot can opt to pay $fourteen.85 every iii months or $39.95 in one case per yr. The company supports all major credit cards but, curiously, does not support PayPal. Trust.Zone also accepts Bitcoin, and so you can make your VPN purchases anonymously. The company offers a 10 percent discount on Bitcoin payments, which I have never seen before with VPNs.
Trust.Zone does not offer a free plan, merely y'all can try the service for complimentary for up to three days. This comes with some restrictions. You only get 1GB of information, can simply access 111 VPN servers, and are express to just one connexion at a fourth dimension. However, it is possible to get a gratuitous VPN. TunnelBear and AnchorFree Hotspot Shield both offer complimentary subscriptions, but practise limit how much data y'all tin can use per month. ProtonVPN also offers a limited free option, but lets you go nuts with the data.
BitTorrenters volition exist pleased to know that Trust.Zone does allow P2P file sharing on its networks. Its policies do, all the same, enquire that you refrain from illegal activity when connected to Trust.Zone. For heavy-duty BitTorrent and file sharing over VPN, we recommend TorGuard.
As mentioned above sites similar Netflix don't take kindly to customers connecting via VPN and will cake them until they switch the VPN off. If you're concerned nearly not being to access some sites and services from a VPN, y'all may desire to buy access to a static IP address. This unique address is, ideally, not associated with a VPN company and is less probable to be blocked by Netflix and other streaming video services. Trust.Zone previously offered static IP addresses for $ix.99 per calendar month, simply the option has been removed from the company's site.
VPN Protocols
VPNs have been effectually for a long time, and there are now several ways to cook upward a good encrypted tunnel. I by and large adopt the OpenVPN protocol, which is newer, more often than not faster, and open source, so its lawmaking has been thoroughly picked over for potential vulnerabilities. Trust.Zone supports OpenVPN, every bit well as IKEv2, some other new and secure protocol. The company also supports L2TP/IPSec, which are older and unlikely to accept compatibility issues with devices.
Trust.Zone uses its ain VPN protocol past default in its Windows client, although you can change it in the client's settings. A visitor representative tells me that this protocol uses AES-256 for data encryption and RSA-4096 for handshake encryption. This protocol is intended to bypass deep-parcel inspection, which is sometimes used to identify and block VPN connections, particularly in countries with repressive governments.
While it'south not a practiced idea to create your own encryption protocol, I've seen several VPN companies offer tweaked VPN protocols built on established standards. AnchorFree Hotspot Shield, for example, merely connects via its custom Hydra protocol.
Because most other VPN services offer first-party clients for different platforms, customers typically don't need to worry about supported protocols. Only Trust.Zone merely supplies client software for Windows. That means if you want to utilise Trust.Zone with any other device, protocols will matter a lot because you'll have to muck around with manual configurations. For an case of but how complicated this tin be, read my story on how to fix upwards a VPN on a Chromebook.
Servers and Server Locations
The size and distribution of a VPN visitor's server network is more than merely a number to brag virtually: it can impact how available the service will exist for customers and how the service will perform.
If a VPN company has lots of servers, there will likely be fewer people per server. A smaller resource allotment of users per server means that each one of those individual users gets a larger share of the bandwidth pie, likely resulting in meliorate performance. That could exist an event with Trust.Zone, which has merely 127 servers. That's a far cry from the 500 server minimum I have come up to expect from top-performing VPN companies. It's a distant scream from the four,800 servers offered past NordVPN, which has the largest server network I've yet seen. Private Internet Access, and TorGuard are also notable for having over 3,000 servers, placing them far in a higher place the contest.
The number of server locations and the distribution of those servers is too an important consideration. For one thing, having more than server locations means y'all accept more than choices nearly where to spoof your location, simply information technology also has an impact on VPN performance. You lot're likely to get the best speeds from a server that is located close to your bodily location. If the VPN company doesn't have a server nearby, your web browsing volition take a hitting.
Trust.Zone has servers beyond 32 countries, which it bundles variously into 80 "zones." That'due south not very much compared to the competition: IPVanish and NordVPN comprehend over 60 countries, and CyberGhost some 90 locations across various countries. Hide My Ass VPN leads the pack in distribution, supporting 286 server locations in 220 countries.
Trust.Zone has a solid server distribution, covering all the major regions of the earth and a few that are typically underserved by VPN companies. The fact that Trust.Zone has servers in South Africa is noteworthy, as far likewise many VPNs ignore Africa entirely. Also notable is that Trust.Zone has servers in Bharat, Hong Kong, and mainland Prc—the last of which has moved to block VPN access. All the same, Trust.Zone lacks servers in other heavily censored countries such every bit Republic of cuba, Russian federation, and Turkey.
Some readers have expressed concern about VPN companies using virtual servers. These are software-divers servers, meaning that a physical server could be dwelling house to many virtual servers. Interestingly, virtual servers tin exist configured to appear as if they are in a unlike location than the physical server that hosts them.
This matters if you're deeply concerned about where, specifically, your information is going. In the instance of Trust.Zone, a representative tells me that the company owns some physical servers and has straight access to them. In other locations with "lower utilization" Trust.Zone rents servers from third parties, just the representative says the company only uses dedicated servers.
The gold standard when it comes to server and network security is probably ProtonVPN. This company has physical admission to several of its servers, which are housed below ground in a vault. Customers can opt to accept their VPN traffic routed through these servers for extra assurance that their data is secure.
Your Privacy With Trust.Zone
One of the most compelling reasons to get a VPN is that information technology protects your online activities from the prying eyes of your ISP. But that means that the VPN company could, if it wanted, snoop on your traffic, and even sell data about you to anyone who asked. That's why it'south important that your VPN company be trustworthy.
What a VPN company does with your information is usually outlined in its corporate privacy policy. I found Trust.Zone's privacy policy to be clear and concise. It hit all the right points, saying it keeps no logs of user activeness, and merely retains user email addresses that are provided at signup.
Information technology'due south platonic that a VPN visitor retain as picayune as possible almost its customers and their action. That way, if the company were to be hacked or subpoenaed by law enforcement, there would be zero of value obtained.
When I review VPNs, I ask company reps the same prepare of questions to ensure that they're on the up and up. They could lie to my face, just my goal is to become companies on record with their positions. Trust.Zone gave me skillful answers, on the whole. For instance, when I asked if the company generated revenue from sources other than customer subscription, a visitor representative said that it had no other coin-making avenues. That's expert, because it means the VPN company isn't monetizing data from or well-nigh its customers.
When I asked what information they gathered, the company'southward answer was in line with its privacy policy. A company representative likewise told me that Trust.Zone doesn't use third political party tools such equally Google Analytics, out of an affluence of business regarding privacy.
It's important to know where a VPN company is physically located. That way, you'll know nether which legal jurisdiction the company operates and whether the visitor has mandatory data retentiveness policies. Trust.Zone is located in the Republic of seychelles, and is not subject to any data memory policies.
Easily On With Trust.Zone
As noted, Trust.Zone just supplies a native client for Windows machines. You can however use any device you lot like with Trust.Zone, but y'all'll have to either configure the operating arrangement's congenital-in VPN client manually or download a 3rd-party customer similar the one available for OpenVPN connections. Information technology's a tedious process and not consumer friendly past whatever stretch of the imagination.
When I first began testing Trust.Zone, installing the client on my Lenovo ThinkPad T460s laptop running Windows ten was a bit of a mess. Everything seemed fine, only I received ambiguous error letters whenever I tried to connect to the VPN.
A Trust .Zone representative referred me to an FAQ article that saying that to use the Trust.Zone awarding on Windows 10, you must get-go disable Driver Signature Enforcement. The article also says that to disable Driver Signature Enforcement you "may need to Disable UEFI Secure Boot in BIOS." All the other VPN clients I have tested fabricated the process of setting up a VPN incredibly simple.
I raised my concerns with a Trust.Zone representative who insisted that using unsigned drivers helped protect consumers, somehow. I disagreed, equally did Microsoft experts I consulted. However, the point became moot when Trust.Zone pushed out an update to its installer so that information technology no longer requires you to mess around with your estimator'southward default security settings. The company apparently found a workaround that satisfied its desire to non use signed drivers and still provide an constructive one-click installation. I'g glad they addressed the upshot, only information technology worries me that information technology was an issue in the offset place.
The Trust.Zone Windows client (over again, the company'southward only client) is a bit of a clunky affair. A simple window in blueish and yellow, it has a large button at the centre to begin a new connection. Click, and yous'll shortly be connected to the VPN server of your choice, or whichever server the app judges to exist the best. You can switch servers hands, and make a few modest adjustments from the Settings console. It lacks the shine I've come to wait from VPN services. Private Internet Access also has an austere client, but it likewise has much more to offer than Trust.Zone.
Trust.Zone and Netflix
Many streaming companies restrict content to people in sure countries. Netflix in Germany, for example, might have a different slate of TV and movies than Netflix in the U.s.. If you lot want to see a show that'due south on Netflix in a different country, just connect to a VPN server in that country.
This is why Netflix hates VPNs, and (I presume) why Netflix blocks access to anyone using a VPN. The VPN companies, on the other hand, desire their customers to be able to access online services without any fuss. And so, the two are locked in an countless artillery race of blocking and circumventing.
In my testing, I found that I couldn't connect to Netflix while using Trust.Zone. Accessing Netflix with a VPN running is a existent mixed experience. Of PCMag's top-ten rated VPN services, these are the services that worked with Netflix when I final checked: CyberGhost, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, TorGuard VPN, and TunnelBear VPN. Of course, what worked when I concluding tested it may not work for you today.
A company representative told me that Trust.Zone doesn't offer specialized streaming servers, which is odd because I found several Trust.Zone VPN servers that were at least labeled as intended to be used with dissimilar video streaming services, including Netflix. My visitor contact said these specialized servers were no longer offered and would exist renamed to avoid future defoliation.
Across VPN
Trust.Zone offers few additional features beyond basic VPN protection. Its Windows client includes a Kill Switch feature, intended to forestall data from accidentally slipping out of your calculator if the VPN should become disconnected.
Some VPN companies include malware protection and advertizement blocking, but Trust.Zone does not. That'south not a neat loss, since these will simply ever complement, just never replace, stand-alone traditional antivirus software.
Nor does Trust.Zone allow y'all to indicate what traffic volition travel through the VPN tunnel and what does not. This feature, called split up-tunneling, is handy for anyone concerned nigh poor VPN speeds affecting the functioning of specific apps—similar video games. PureVPN and Ivacy VPN, among others, practice offer this insufficiently rare feature.
NordVPN may toll significantly more than Trust.Zone, only it also includes streaming-specific servers, malicious site protection, and even easy access to the Tor anonymization service to name a few.
Speed and Operation
Using a VPN means that your web traffic goes through more wires and more machines than normal, which in turn means that you're probably going to run across more latency and lower upload and download speeds than usual. To get a sense of how large an impact each VPN makes, we run a series of tests using the Ookla speed test tool. (Note that Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns PCMag.)
We first run several tests with the VPN inactive, then several tests with the VPN active. Then, we drib the highest and lowest results, average what remains, and notice a percent modify between the two sets of test results. To get a sense of how the VPN performs when accessing overseas servers, nosotros run a 2nd series of tests, but this fourth dimension using a VPN server in Australia and an Ookla test server in Anchorage, Alaska.
{{ZIFFIMAGE id="152477" notable nopopup align="left"> Run into How We Test VPNs
We command for equally many variables equally we can to make these tests a useful indicate of comparing. However, they shouldn't be considered a definitive assessment of a VPN service'south performance. Retrieve of these more as a snapshot in fourth dimension. Depending on where you are, when you are using the VPN service, and what servers you connect with, your mileage may vary.
In my domestic latency testing, I institute that Trust.Zone increased latency by 238.5 percent. That's non the worst score I've recorded, merely virtually other VPNs manage improve. The all-time recent score comes from TorGuard VPN, which reduced latency by 6.7 percent in my testing. In the international latency testing, Trust.Zone increased latency by 311.5 per centum, which is par for the course. TunnelBear has the best score in this test, raising latency by 270.iii percent.
Trust.Zone performed well in the all-important download speeds test. Domestically, it reduced download speeds by a mere 4.ix percent. TorGuard, however, edged it out for another win, dropping download speeds by only 3.seven per centum. Trust.Zone did well in the international download examination as well, slowing speeds by 54.ii percent. AnchorFree Hotspot Shield has the best score in this exam, where it reduced download speeds by 39.9 percent.
My test results showed Trust.Zone slips a bit in the domestic upload test, where it lowers upload speeds by 7.half-dozen percent. IPVanish has the best score in this category, reducing upload speeds by two.9 percent. The international upload tests accept e'er been a strange brute, with all results clustering effectually 98 pct, and Trust.Zone falls in line with this trend. It reduced international upload speeds by 98.5 percent. Private Internet Access had the best score in this test, where information technology reduced speeds by 97.3 per centum.
To get a sense of where Trust.Zone ranks, the following chart shows the latest results from the top-rated VPNs.
I do not remember that speed should exist the merely criterion on which a VPN is judged, or fifty-fifty the most important criterion. Merely people are understandably very concerned virtually having to trade functioning for security. At PCMag, we've constitute that TorGuard VPN had the least impact on spider web browsing overall, and have named it the fastest VPN nosotros've yet reviewed.
Before Trust.Zone pushed out its client software update, I had already run my entire battery of speed tests using the VPN client from OpenVPN and Trust.Zone servers. These results were significantly worse than what I found using the Trust.Zone client software in all categories, and in most cases either the worst scores I had recorded, or very close to them. This is probable because the Trust.Zone client software does a meliorate job picking servers than I did. Yet, I see information technology as an indictment of Trust.Zone's conclusion to non offering showtime-party clients on other platforms. I did my best to choose a server I idea would perform well based off the location names given to the servers, and my results were terrible.
Trust.Zone for Android
Trust.Zone doesn't offer a customer for Android. Instead, the company recommends that customers manually configure the VPN client inside Android or download and configure the OpenVPN app. This solution works, only it'south non great for customers. Nosotros much prefer to run into splendid Android VPN apps from vendors.
Trust.Zone for iPhone
As with other platforms, Trust.Zone does not offer a VPN app for iPhones. That'south disappointing, only the same work-around applies: if you lot want to use Trust.Zone with your iOS device you lot'll take to configure the built-in client or download and configure the OpenVPN app. Neither of these approaches are particular customer friendly.
Trust.Zone for Mac
Past this bespeak, a careful reader will not be surprised to discover that Trust.Zone does not offer a VPN app for macOS. If you're on a Mac and keen to utilize Trust.Zone, you can manually configure the built-in client. On its website, Trust.Zone recommends using the open up-source Tunnelblick OpenVPN client. We notwithstanding prefer VPN services that provide customers a full range of clients for their devices.
Trust.Zone for Browsers and ChromeOS
When I spoke with a Trust.Zone representative, they told me the company does not offer a browser plugin. Several other VPN services now offer plugins that only encrypt browser traffic while your other apps communicate exterior the VPN tunnel. NordVPN, Private Cyberspace Access, TunnelBear, IPVanish, and KeepSolid VPN Unlimited are the top-rated VPN services that do offer browser plugins.
In detail, TunnelBear is notable for its browser support. This carry-centric company offers a password manager and tracker blocker, as well as its VPN service, in the form of browser plugins.
After tinkering withVPNs and ChromeOS for a very, very long time, it'southward my decision that the all-time manner to use a VPN on that platform is past running an Android VPN app. Unfortunately, Trust.Zone does not provide an Android app. While it is possible to configure the VPN client arranged with ChromeOS, I found that it didn't always work with OpenVPN.
Cheap, Unimpressive
Trust.Zone VPN may accept a very competitive monthly fee, but it doesn't offer much else. Once the company updated its Windows client, it racked upwardly decent speed test scores, just its drove of servers and server locations is disappointingly small. The biggest drawback of Trust.Zone is that it only offers ane customer, leaving customers to fend for themselves on mobile and macOS. That'due south unusual among VPN companies. Our Editors' Pick winners supply more than robust server networks, better clients beyond more than devices, and a plethora of useful extra features beyond basic VPN protection. They are NordVPN, Private Internet Access, and TunnelBear.
A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a server controlled by the VPN company. All your spider web traffic is routed through the tunnel, which keeps prying eyes out. Even clever attackers on your network, or in control of your network, won't be able to get a peek.
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