Hotspot Shield Review

While the VPN service logs a lot of information, it takes some steps to mitigate the risk to your privacy.

Your real IP address is collected at the start of your VPN session, but it is immediately encrypted and deleted upon disconnection. Similarly, while the VPN logs the domain names you visit, it doesn’t store the full URL and it aggregates the data.

The rest of the data it logs isn’t as sensitive, but there’s no clearly defined retention window. This includes: bandwidth usage, connection timestamps, VPN server location, and originating location.

The free version is even less private, as it shares your device information and geographic location with third-party advertisers when in use.

Our issue here is less the logging itself, and more that it’s all self-reported. Hotspot Shield has never had its privacy tested by a real-world event, like a court case, so we have no idea if it’s telling the truth.

We do have the results from a third-party audit in 2023, but this doesn’t offer the same standard of proof since a VPN provider can prepare for it and limit the scope of an investigation — unlike a sudden server seizure. Nor has the VPN released a transparency report since 2019, and that was under different ownership.

Until Hotspot Shield faces an unannounced server seizure or court order, we can’t fully verify its claims. In the meantime, we want to see it reinstate transparency reports, commission regular audits, and move towards a fully diskless server network.

Owned by Aura, Based in the US

Hotspot Shield is operated by Pango, a subsidiary of US-based company Aura. Pango is the entity that controls your data and would be subject to any legal demands — and as a US-based operation, that’s a problem. US authorities can compel it to retain and share your information.

The US is also a founding member of the Five Eyes network of countries that work together to collect, share, and analyze mass surveillance data. None of this is good for privacy. Ideally, Hotspot Shield would be based in a place where there are no data retention laws, like the British Virgin Islands.

Hotspot Shield is a mixed bag for streaming, with most of its value coming from Netflix.

While it can only unblock 6 Netflix regions, the VPN takes a quality-over-quantity approach with consistent access to some of the most popular content libraries, namely: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and India.

The VPN often worked on the first or second attempt, but you can also switch to streaming-optimized servers for guaranteed access. Annoyingly, this feature isn’t available on macOS, so you’ll need to keep cycling through the standard servers until it works.

In general, the VPN is a solid option for US and UK-based streaming services. This includes two platforms that use some of the strictest geo-blocks: BBC iPlayer and Hulu.

HBO Max never detected our VPN connection.

Hotspot Shield is held back by the simple reason that it can’t match the breadth of streaming catalogs of rival VPNs. Most notably, DAZN detected our VPN connection across every single region that we tried. This is multiple countries’ worth of streaming content you’re missing out on.

We recommend switching to IPVanish or NordVPN if you want a broader selection of content. It’s a much smoother experience too, since both VPNs optimize their entire server network for streaming by default.

Free Version Unblocks US Netflix

Hotspot Shield Basic is among a select group of free VPNs that can unblock US Netflix. Combined with its industry-leading speeds and unlimited data, this makes it a great free VPN for streaming.

Hotspot Shield’s free app works with US Netflix.

We also found success using its free Singapore server to unblock Netflix Singapore and other local streaming services.

As our data shows, there is virtually no difference in download speed between your normal connection and a Hotspot Shield connection.

Connecting to an Australian VPN server, we experienced a speed loss of 1%. For long-distance connections, it doesn’t get better than that.

Hotspot Shield maxed out our fixed 100Mbps connection.

While we can’t guarantee identical results, we’re certain Hotspot Shield is fast enough for any online activity. We’ve used it for years to access easier lobbies on PUBG, and in all that time we’ve never experienced any lag or disconnects, even across continents.

To put these results in context, use the bar chart below and compare Hotspot Shield’s speeds to other fast VPNs, including ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Hide.me:

Hotspot Shield achieves these speeds through its exclusive connection protocol, Hydra VPN. You must go into your app settings and change the protocol from ‘Auto’ to ‘Hydra’, otherwise you may experience slower speeds.

Free Version Is in a League of Its Own

The free VPN is just as fast as the paid version, but it’s limited to 3 servers.

The free and paid VPNs only seriously differed in our tests when connecting to the US West Coast, where we recorded a 28% speed loss, which is considerably slower compared to the paid version’s result of less than 1%.

Despite this small hiccup, Hotspot Shield Basic is still miles ahead of every other free VPN.

Hotspot Shield includes WireGuard and IKEv2 protocols, but also its own proprietary protocol called Hydra (formerly Catapult Hydra).

Hydra is safe to use: it’s based on TLS 1.2, uses 128-bit AES encryption and 2048-BIT RSA certificates for server authentication, and incorporates perfect forward secrecy.

We tested to see whether Hydra actually encrypts your traffic by running it through the packet-analyzer, Wireshark. As you can see in the image below, all of our outgoing internet traffic was left encrypted:

The Hydra protocol successfully encrypted our internet connection.

Despite this, Hydra remains a closed-source technology, meaning there’s no way for independent experts to thoroughly test it. Hotspot Shield claims the code has been assessed by cybersecurity firms like BitDefender and McAfee. If you trust this, you should use Hydra without concern. If not, it’s better to use WireGuard.

As part of our testing process, we also check for IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks, which Hotspot Shield passed. However, we learned it doesn’t support IPV6 addresses, opting to block them instead.

If you use an IPv6 address, your personal IP may be leaked. To avoid this, switch to a VPN that offers a dual-stack solution, like Hide.me.

While the Hotspot Shield apps came back leak-free, the same isn’t the case for its Chrome browser extension. Our tests showed that the Chrome extension leaks DNS requests – even with the WebRTC leak blocker enabled.

This means that your ISP can still see the websites you visit when connected to the Chrome extension. We caution against using this browser extension.

Another security shortcoming concerns the VPN’s kill switch. This is an essential feature that works by blocking your internet in the event of an unintended disruption to your VPN connection.

Our issue here is two-fold: the macOS app doesn’t have a kill switch, and on other apps it’s not turned on by default.

There isn’t a kill switch in Hotspot Shield’s Mac app or running in the background.

Our advice is to avoid handling sensitive data on macOS, or upgrade to a VPN with a working kill switch (like PIA).

Like most VPNs, the majority of Hotspot Shield’s servers are situated in North America and Europe. However, there are more options in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa than usual. It’s refreshing to see servers in countries like Algeria, Bhutan, Pakistan, Nepal, and Peru, for instance.

There are city-level options in six countries, including Australia, Canada, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US.

It’s a shame that Hotspot Shield’s city servers are all in Western countries, but it’s still a good number of options, especially in the US, where there are 24 available cities.

Hotspot Shield has a large and diverse server network.

Hotspot Shield does not disclose how many individual IP addresses it maintains, but it’s able to offer IP addresses in various parts of the globe because it uses virtual servers. This means it doesn’t have physical hardware in the country, but it’s still able to unblock geo-restricted content.

Hotspot Shield Basic Limited to 3 Countries

Hotspot Shield Free’s server network is a lot smaller than the paid version. It has servers on the US East Coast (New York), US West Coast (Los Angeles), UK, and Singapore.

It’s rare to see a free VPN provide a Singaporean server location.

This is very limited, well below the 10 free countries on offer from Windscribe’s free VPN.

Hotspot Shield’s apps are simple, well designed, and mostly consistent across devices.

Here’s an overview of our experience using Hotspot Shield on different devices and operating systems:

Hotspot Shield openly endorses torrenting on its service, but we don’t recommend it due to the VPN’s slow average download bitrate, its intrusive logging policy, and the absence of a kill switch on macOS. Torrenting with Hotspot Shield is not without risk.

When testing Hotspot Shield with torrent clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent, we recorded an average download bitrate of 4.3MiB/s. This is a low result that can lead to slow file-sharing, especially when compared to the top-rated torrenting VPNs.

Despite its reputation, Hotspot Shield is slow for torrenting.

From a privacy standpoint, we are concerned by Hotspot Shield’s intrusive logging policy that collects lots of user data. We have no idea how many DMCA requests Hotspot Shield receives and responds to, since it has stopped publishing transparency reports.

Furthermore, there is no kill switch on macOS, so your real IP may get accidentally exposed. Finally, Hotspot Shield does not offer port forwarding or a SOCKS5 proxy, yet another reason to avoid it if you’re an advanced torrenter.

Hotspot Shield’s device compatibility is one of the reasons we still classify it as a mid-tier VPN. Compare it to our top 10 VPN services, all of which have apps for Apple TV, a CLI or app for Linux, and router support. Put simply, the gap is getting wider and wider.

Most troubling is the continued absence of a Smart DNS proxy and the removal of router configuration files from the account dashboard. This means you can’t use Hotspot Shield on any devices that don’t support native VPN apps, which includes Smart TVs, game consoles, and any other internet-connected devices.

Unlike other VPN websites, we actually test VPNs against the most sophisticated web censorship in the world: The Great Firewall of China.

Using our server in Shanghai, we can report that, over a yearly period, Hotspot Shield has only worked to access the free internet within China 14% of the time.

This is surprising, as Hotspot Shield claims to have obfuscation technology for its proprietary Hydra protocol, designed to make VPN traffic look like normal web traffic and bypass blocks.

It’s possible that Hotspot Shield will work in countries where web censorship is less aggressive, like Russia and Iran. However, our data tells us that there are more dependable VPNs available.

Astrill VPN, for example, has a 100% success rate for bypassing Chinese censorship and it remains the best VPN for China.

On the flip side, if you want to connect into China and use the Chinese internet, Hotspot Shield is one of the few services that has a virtual China server location that gives you a Chinese IP address.

Unlike most other VPNs, Hotspot Shield limits its split tunneling feature to Windows and Android only.

This is disappointing as it’s a useful feature for customizing which apps and websites enter the VPN tunnel.

Hotspot Shield lets you include or exclude apps, providing a level of granular control that isn’t the case with other VPN services.