Hola Free VPN Review

Hola VPN is not software that safeguards your privacy. In fact, we rarely see logging policies as intrusive as Hola’s.

Here’s what Hola VPN stores when you use its service:

• The websites you visit
• Time spent on those websites
• Your true IP address
• Connection timestamps
• Your browser type
• Your name, email address, screen name, payment and billing information

If subscribe to Hola VPN through a social network account, Hola has access to even more information including: your home address, birth date, profile picture, friend list, personal bio, and any publicly available information on your account.

Hola tries to reassure its users that it doesn’t “rent or sell any personal information,” but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t share it with third parties:

“We may disclose Personal Information to other trusted third party service providers or partners for the purposes of providing you with the Services, storage and analytics. We may also transfer or disclose Personal Information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies.”

What’s even worse, Hola will retain all this information for “as long as necessary.”

In short, Hola’s privacy and logging policy is unsatisfactory. This is not a service you want to entrust all your personal data with.

Who Owns Hola VPN?

Hola VPN was founded by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman under the company name Hola Networks Limited, based in Israel.

The product was launched in 2012, and gained traction in January 2013 when it moved from 80 downloads a day to 40,000 overnight.

Hola Networks Limited provides a free consumer ‘VPN’ service, as well as a premium subscription and corporate service called Luminati.

Luminati uses free users’ bandwidth, which is charged per gigabyte, without reimbursing the free user. This practice has sparked criticism among cybersecurity professionals.

Thankfully, this is now clearly advertised when you download the app, as you can see in the screenshot below.

How Hola VPN actually works

Hola VPN is a peer-to-peer overlay network that uses peer-to-peer caching and routing for quick access to blocked content.

This means users of Hola VPN throw their real IP address into a pool of IP addresses for other users to use as they please.

When you use Hola VPN, your internet traffic is routed through other peers (called nodes), but it’s not encrypted.

While some subscribers may use Hola VPN as a website unblocker, there’s no way to stop others using your IP address to access unlawful content.

Free users also share their ‘idle resources’ (WiFi and cellular data) with the network, which means that Hola VPN doesn’t incur underlying operational costs.

Hola VPN defines ‘idle’ as “the device is not using battery but is connected to electricity; no mouse or keyboard activity has been detected; and the device is connected to the internet.”

Despite its “goal of making a better internet,” selling user bandwidth is not the only controversy Hola VPN has been embroiled in to date.

In May 2015, 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan claimed that his website had been DDoS attacked by users exploiting the Hola network, which Vilenski later confirmed.

A website named Adios, Hola!, created by nine security researchers, states that Hola is “harmful to the internet as a whole, and to its users in particular” and labels it a “poorly secured botnet” with “serious consequences.”

The researchers at Adios, Hola! discovered various vulnerabilities within the Hola VPN architecture, one of which reportedly allowed anyone to execute programs on your computer.

According to the website, Hola fixed some of the vulnerabilities, but others still remain.

Hola VPN is also vulnerable to IP address leaks and has facilitated data scraping, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.

Hola VPN’s jurisdiction

Hola VPN is based in Israel, which isn’t an official member of the Five Eyes (or Nine or 14 Eyes) intelligence-sharing alliance, but it collaborates with it.

The VPN company states in it privacy policy that it will “comply with law, regulation, subpoena or court order.” It will also hand over your personal information if it has “good reason to believe that it is necessary to.”

We’re not going to compare Hola’s speeds with the other VPNs we’ve tested because Hola isn’t really a VPN service, it’s more like a proxy.

Hola uses an unencrypted connection, resulting in less slowdowns but considerably more risk, and only browser traffic is routed through the peer nodes.

The node you’re connecting to can also affect your connection speeds. So, if the peer you’re routing your traffic through has poor internet speeds, yours may suffer too.

When we connected to a node in a nearby country, we experienced practically no speed drop off.

In our latest tests, Hola’s speeds dropped a little over long distances and ping times increased, but that’s to be expected. The longer the distance the connection travels, the slower the speed and the higher the latency.

Connecting from the UK to the US, we recorded 35Mbps download speed and 48Mbps upload speed, with a ping time of 97ms.

Fast speeds shouldn’t be a reason to use Hola VPN due to its lack of encryption and the security risks it brings. See our list of the fastest (safe) VPNs, instead.

The free version of Hola VPN doesn’t work with popular streaming platforms like Netflix, BBC iPlayer, or Hulu.

You’ll have to pay for the Premium or the Ultra Hola VPN service to unblock some of these content platforms.

Hola VPN Premium costs $14.99 on a pay-monthly plan, $7.69 per month on a yearly subscription, and $2.99 on a 3-year plan You can use the Premium account on up to 10 devices at any given time.

Regardless, we advise you to use a VPN for streaming that doesn’t log your online activity. Netflix fans should use one of these free VPNs that work with Netflix.

Hola Free VPN provides no connection encryption, and no kill switch either. If your VPN connection fails, your real IP address will be visible to everyone.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the VPN service logs and stores your web activity. Moreover, it isn’t afraid to hand that information over to authorities.

Instead of using Hola VPN to download torrents, take a look at our list of the best free and paid VPNs for torrenting.

Hola VPN doesn’t come with any obfuscation tools to beat the Chinese censors.

The service’s lack of encryption means you won’t be able to access blocked content in China, due to the Great Firewall’s use of deep packet inspection (DPI).

We tested Hola VPN from our Shanghai test server, and can confirm that Hola VPN does not work in China. What’s more, the latest version of the Hola app won’t even open properly for us – it just shows us this error message:

If you’re in China or you plan on travelling there, you can find a list of VPNs that actually work in China in our dedicated guide.

With Hola, users’ traffic is routed through nodes (other users’ devices), and spoofs your IP address (using that device’s IP address) to get around website blocks.

That means that other people – complete strangers – are using your IP address to do with as they please. That could get you into a lot of trouble.

According to a member of the customer support team, users’ traffic is first sent to Hola servers before it reaches the peer nodes for security reasons, but this still doesn’t make Hola secure enough for our liking.

There are no security features – like a kill switch or leak blocking – to keep your personal data safe, either. The Windows app does come with an ad-blocker, though.

We experienced WebRTC leaks during our tests, which means that our true IP address was left exposed.

The very architecture of Hola Free VPN means that your personal data is not secure or private. Hackers can still intercept your traffic and your ISP can still see the websites you visit.

Hola VPN PLUS, which is the paid-for product, does use standard VPN protocols and encryption, and doesn’t use your device as a peer.

However, you’ll still be subject to Hola’s intrusive logging policy, so we strongly advise against using Hola VPN PLUS. It’s not good value for such a risky product, either.

On top of all of its privacy and security issues, Hola VPN’s customer support isn’t very good, either.

There are a bunch of FAQs available on its website, but these read more like a disclaimer than genuine help.

Hola VPN came under scrutiny when it previously didn’t disclose the relationship between free users’ data and the Luminati corporate service, but that has since been rectified on the FAQs page.

You can find out how the VPN service works (by using your personal information and data), how it makes money (ditto), and some very basic troubleshooting tips.

However, there are no detailed set-up instructions or user guides. There’s no live chat support either.

Hola VPN does supply a support email address, and in the past all of our queries were left ignored. However, during our most recent tests we were relieved to finally receive some replies.

The replies we did get were initially unhelpful – just redirecting us to the FAQs. After some perseverence we were able to get the help we needed, though.