VPN.AC Review

VPN.AC is incorporated in Romania, owned by a company called Netsec Interactive Solutions. It even lists its full address on its website and LinkedIn profile page: 76 Calea Dumbravii Street, 550399, Sibiu, Romania.

Romania is a solid choice of base for a VPN. While it’s located within the EU, data retention is considered illegal by Romanian courts.

When the Romanian government introduced the EU’s 2006 Data Retention Directive, in 2009 the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) stated these laws were an unconstitutional violation of Romanian citizens’ rights to privacy.

As a result, Romania is the only EU country to have successfully thrown out the EU’s data retention laws.

Here is everything that VPN.AC logs of its users:

However, these logs are deleted “once a session is terminated.” That’s what transforms VPN.AC’s privacy policy from a horrible one into one which is actually very safe.

In order for any of this data to be obtained by hackers, they would have to be physically stood in the same room or connected to the same network as the server you’re connected to while you’re using the service. This is extremely unlikely to ever happen.

VPN.AC has really surprised us with these most recent speed tests, conducted in July 2022. Its download speeds in particular shot up to a rate comparable with almost any VPN on the market.

This is particularly impressive given its lack of WireGuard protocol – all of these tests were conducted using the OpenVPN protocol with AES-256 encryption.

Here are all the figures reported from the testing:

We consider a download speed drop of 10% or less while connected to a nearby server to be negligible – which VPN.AC manages. You should be able to turn it on and forget about it, browsing the internet, downloading files, and streaming just like normal.

VPN.AC’s local speeds averaged out well. We didn’t record much difference between the various OpenVPN protocols, either.

International Speed Test Results

VPN.AC performs well over long distances, even if there is still a (understandable) drop-off when connecting to Japan and Australia:

One abnormality to take note of is that, despite excellent download speeds when we connected to a US server, upload speeds took a large hit. This might not hinder you too much, but sharing files or using video chat will be affected.

Ping Times Might Affect Gaming

While its speeds are excellent, we did record some slow ping times from VPN.AC – mostly on international connections.

Here’s what they look like:

WireGuard may be well on its way to becoming the dominant protocol in the VPN industry, but there’s still nothing wrong with OpenVPN.

Trustworthy, fast, and safe, OpenVPN is VPN.AC’s protocol of choice. On most platforms it actually offers four variants: ECC, 256-bit, 128-bit, and XOR. Here’s how they differ:

All of these can be used in either TCP or UDP variants: UDP is quicker but TCP is more reliable.

This is an unusual approach to protocols that we’ve not seen from any other VPN services. We recommend OpenVPN ECC or 256-bit for everyday usage and OpenVPN XOR when you need to bypass strict censorship (for example if you’re in China).

On macOS and Windows there’s also the highly-outdated L2TP, which we recommend you never use. iOS has no choice of protocol – it uses IKEv2 by default, which performs very similarly to OpenVPN for speed and security. You can also choose IKEv2 on Windows if you want.

We packet sniffed our own connection using Wireshark while connected to VPN.AC. We observed everything fully encrypted.

VPN.AC successfully encrypted all of our traffic while connected. We tested this using Wireshark, a packet-sniffing tool, the results of which you can see above.

Kill Switch Has Issues on macOS

The kill switch is the most important part of any VPN’s feature set – without it your true IP becomes exposed if the VPN fails at any point, and your traffic is left unencrypted.

The good news is that VPN.AC passed our kill switch test with flying colors on Windows, Android, and iOS.

The bad news is that we had some occasional issues with it on macOS. It worked successfully when we manually disconnected our WiFi, but would sometimes fail when we changed between server locations.

In this instance, when we tested VPN.AC’s kill switch there were no leaks. However that wasn’t always the case.

This isn’t catastrophic, as changing server locations is usually something initiated willingly by the user. However, it’s an inconvenience if you need to change servers while in the middle of a sensitive or private task.

Extra Features Vary by Platform

We always prefer VPNs to have one consistent set of features across all of its apps. VPN.AC can be confusing to use due to how different the options in each of its apps are.

See the table below for an overview of all of VPN.AC’s extra features and what platforms they’re available on:

Split tunneling is the big miss here. It’s not as vital for security as the kill switch, but it’s a super popular and useful feature that’s present on the vast majority of VPNs. VPN.AC only including it on Android is a very unusual choice.

We also like the inclusion of IPv6 blocking on desktop, which ensures your IPv6 address won’t leak (if you have one).

DNS filtering is the latest feature to be added to VPN.AC. It’s disabled by default on Windows and Android, but has two other modes: SecureDNS and SecureDNS + local streaming.

When set to SecureDNS VPN.AC will block ads, malware, and trackers, while also letting you access the US Netflix library.

When set to SecureDNS + local streaming it will act as a blocker as above, but while letting you access your usual, local Netflix library.

VPN.AC performed very well, but an outright ad and tracker blocker like uBlock Origin would score close to 100%.

VPN.AC’s content blocker works well, successfully preventing 84% of all ads and trackers – that’s above average for a VPN ad blocking tool.

VPN.AC Is Safe to Use on All Platforms

We scanned all of VPN.AC’s installers using VirusTotal.com, and the results were all clean: it’s safe to install on your personal devices.

VirusTotal runs checks on a huge and constantly-updated database of known viruses and malware.

We also checked it with the εxodus tool to see what Android app permissions it demands:

Some permissions are absolutely necessary for a VPN to operate – we are satisfied with almost all of VPN.AC’s.

It’s ordinary to see at least a few permissions here due to the nature of how VPNs work. However there is one which struck us as odd – we do not know why VPN.AC requires permission to read all external storage devices attached to your device.

That said, we still trust VPN.AC on Android.

How much use you’ll get out of VPN.AC for streaming depends on where you are in the world. It does a great job of unblocking all three major UK-based services: BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, and All 4. We found it worked on any UK server and any protocol.

This isn’t very useful if you live in the UK, but is brilliant if you don’t.

It’s also pretty good for unblocking US streaming sites: it works for US Netflix, Amazon Prime Video US, and Disney+’s US library.

Getting it to work with some of them isn’t straightforward, though. To access Disney+ we had to use the OpenVPN XOR protocol.

With VPN.AC connected to a US server we weren’t able to log into Netflix. But, if we logged in with the VPN disconnected, then connected to a US server once signed in, it worked fine.

In this example we’re connected to a German VPN.AC server but still accessing US Netflix.

VPN.AC also seems to use US Netflix as a general fallback for whenever the VPN is connected. This means that, while it failed to unblock any other Netflix region, it unblocked US Netflix no matter what server we were connected to – regardless of the region.

After a long time on a black screen, Hulu would also sometimes show us error code P-DEV322.

It looked like it was going to work with Hulu, as it allowed us to log in and select a show to watch, but the screen would simply remain black with nothing playing.

HBO Max was similar. We could log in, but it was unable to play anything. It showed us a couple of error codes we’d never seen before: e09e07e0-b551-4356-8799-f4c0210111cc (Something Went Wrong) and simply a generic “Can’t Play Title.”

HBO Max’s error code doesn’t tell you what went wrong, but it’s safe to say it’s related to using a VPN.

However, we then tested those two services while connected to the VPN.AC Chrome browser extension. This time, it successfully unblocked both. The same thing happened with the Amazon Fire TV app, too.

Hulu streamed with no issues when using the Chrome extension – here we show it working in the Opera GX browser.

While we like that VPN.AC allows torrenting across its entire server network, we were disappointed to find while testing that it seriously caps speeds on non-optimized servers.

VPN.AC’s dedicated P2P servers recorded some very impressive download bitrates.

We recorded excellent download speeds on the P2P-optimized France and Netherlands servers: an average of 9.0MiB/s versus 10.0MiB/s with no VPN at all is fantastic for torrenters.

However when we connected to a UK server, which should in theory be even closer to us, we found speeds plummeted to just 1.5MiB/s on average. This is because the UK has no P2P-optimized servers.

While we were able to work around this, not everyone will be so lucky. The entirety of Asia, Oceania, and South America are left with no torrenting servers. You can still torrent on your nearest ordinary VPN.AC server, but you’ll likely experience the same slow speeds we did when trying the same.

A Safe & Secure Choice for Torrenting

We have no concerns with VPN.AC and torrenting when it comes to safety, though. We fully approve of its minimal logging policy and it has a functioning kill switch.

There’s no port forwarding, which is a shame, but the VPN.AC knowledge base does have instructions for how to set up the SOCKS5 proxy on qBitTorrent, uTorrent, and Deluge.

It also offers a useful guide on how to set up a torrenting-specific kill switch in Windows. If you follow those steps, your PC will automatically stop all torrenting traffic if the VPN fails, preventing an IP leak.

VPN.AC puts a lot of effort and resources into working well in China, and it’s paid off. Our testing has found it to be one of the most reliable VPNs for beating strict censorship over the past year.

There’s an option within its advanced settings menu labeled “I am in China or other censored country“. Toggling this on reveals a list of China-optimized options in the main server list.

Combine one of these servers with the OpenVPN XOR protocol/obfuscation combo offered in all of its apps and you’re ready to access websites ordinarily blocked within China, such as Instagram and YouTube.

While we can confirm that it works in China thanks to our server in Shanghai, we can’t perform tests in other censored countries, like Russia or Turkey. However, given that China’s censorship is the most rigorous and complex, we’re confident recommending VPN.AC for any other censored region.

VPN.AC just misses out on being one of the most reliable VPNs for China – see how it compares to the best VPNs here.

VPN.AC has two sections within the support area of its website: tutorials and knowledge base. The tutorials on offer show you how to install the VPN on every available device and operating system – both for the dedicated apps as well as setting up individual protocols via third party software.

The knowledge base covers most other topics. If you have questions regarding the differences between protocols, what the features within the app do, or simply how billing works, we were impressed by the scope and detail of the articles available.

It’s a shame, then, that you have to rely on a ticketing system to get any direct queries answered by a VPN.AC employee.

VPN.AC’s customer support are knowledgeable and keen to help, but the wait times take away from that.

When we submitted a question at around 3pm we had to wait until 8am the following day for a reply.

In fairness to VPN.AC this isn’t always the case – we’ve had conversations before where we’ve received a response after just 25 minutes. The inconsistency is still an issue, though. If you’re struggling to get your VPN to work you want to know that a quick resolution is guaranteed.