Below is a detailed breakdown of our Italy VPN testing process, alongside the weighting of each category towards each VPN’s overall rating:
Italy Server Locations: 30%
Having access to Italian VPN servers and IP addresses is the most important feature of a VPN for Italy.
Connecting to Italian VPN servers allows you to access blocked Italian websites and stream your favorite shows and movies from sites like RaiPlay and Mediaset Infinity.
The more Italian servers available the better, as this results in better speeds, uninterrupted connections, and less congestion. We reward VPNs that have lots of Italian servers spread across multiple cities, and spread evenly across the country for good coverage.
Italy Streaming: 30%
Although most VPNs have Italian servers, not all of them can unblock Italian streaming services. We regularly test 65 VPNs on six Italian streaming sites: Netflix Italy, RaiPlay, Mediaset Infinity, DAZN Italy, SuperTennis, and La7.
We gather data and recommend the VPNs that consistently unblock these Italian sites and stream content without buffering. You can see the results of our Italian streaming tests in the table below:
Speed: 20%
We reward the VPNs that provide fast international speeds. Connecting to Italy from a country as far away as the US should affect your normal internet connection speeds as little as possible.
Our evaluation is based on data that we gather from regular manual speed tests, conducted on our own test servers.
Security & Technical Features: 10%
We ensure that every VPN we recommend is safe to use by putting it through a series of security tests.
We use our own leak test tool to check for any IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks. We use Wireshark to check that every VPN is actually encrypting your traffic, and we inspect the security protocols used by each VPN. Kill switches are also tested via our in-house kill switch test tool.
We give extra points to VPNs that include additional technical features like ad and tracker blockers, double VPN, or rotating IP addresses.
Privacy & Logging Policy: 10%
VPNs are tools that safeguard your online privacy and security, so we always make sure the VPNs we recommend are safe to use.
We analyze each VPN’s privacy policy, legal jurisdiction, corporate history, and any evidence that substantiates its logging claims, including audits and court cases.
Based on this data, we determine each VPN’s privacy performance and give it a rating. This ensures we never recommend a VPN that logs identifying data or doesn’t effectively encrypt your web traffic.
Data Cap Reduction: Up to 50%
Free VPN services can be useful, but it’s important to acknowledge the limitations that data caps impose on VPN users.
To account for this, we apply penalties to free VPNs that enforce data usage caps. The more restrictive the data limit, the stricter the penalty. Here’s how it breaks down:
- 10GB per month: -20% applied to the overall rating
- 500MB per day: -25% applied to the overall rating
- 5GB per month: -30% applied to the overall rating
- 1GB per month: -35% applied to the overall rating
- 200MB per day: -40% applied to the overall rating
- 500MB per month: -50% applied to the overall rating
TunnelBear Free has the strictest data cap of any VPN, so we’ve docked 50% from it’s overall Italy rating to reflect its limited capabilities.
