VyprVPN Review

VyprVPN is a completely no-logs VPN. In its current privacy policy, it explicitly states that:

• It does not log users’ IP addresses
• It does not log the IP address assigned to users when using VyprVPN
• It does not log connection start or stop times
• It does not log users’ traffic or the content of any communications
• It is network neutral. It does not discriminate against devices, protocols, or applications
• It does not throttle or limit internet connection speeds
  

  VyprVPN’s current logging policy.

This is a very clear and detailed logging policy that sets out a principled vision for the relationship between user and network provider.

Being network neutral is a key detail: it means VyprVPN won’t run real-time analysis of your traffic or block certain kinds of activity. Importantly it means you can torrent on any server you want.

Similarly, by agreeing not to log your IP address or connection times, VyprVPN makes it impossible for a third party to trace an IP back to you, even with a warrant. Again, this is good news for file-sharing users, but we’ll go over this in more detail later in the review.

Past logging practices

A few years ago VyprVPN’s logging policy far exceeded what we consider reasonable. It has since fixed this, and we now feel comfortable recommending VyprVPN as a private service.

You can still see the old privacy policy using the Wayback Machine.

VyprVPN’s old privacy policy.

The old privacy policy used to state that Golden Frog retains “the user’s source IP address, the VyprVPN IP address used by the user, connection start and stop time and total number of bytes used” for 30 days.

That data could completely deanonymize users, and there are examples of VyprVPN using it to hand over its users’ information to DMCA trolls.

Logging policy audit

Thankfully, Golden Frog has since updated its approach to user data. It was even one of the first VPNs to commission an independent logging policy audit in 2018.

The audit initially found some issues with how the service was handling personally identifiable information, but this was quickly rectified.

Ideally, we want to see VyprVPN undergo another external audit in 2022.

Who owns VyprVPN?

VyprVPN belongs to Golden Frog GmbH, which is itself owned by Powerhouse Management.

Powerhouse Management and its subsidiaries belong to Ron and Carolyn Yokubaitis, who have been working in internet access and networking since they started Texas.net in 1994.

While it’s operated from Texas, US, Golden Frog is incorporated in Switzerland. This is a plus for user privacy, although not as big as some believe.

Switzerland is often called a ‘privacy haven’ because it isn’t in the EU, or in a major data sharing alliance like the Five Eyes or SIGINT. This means it doesn’t have formal agreements for sharing surveillance data. However, Switzerland does sometimes share information with other countries.

It also has data retention laws, the BÜPF and, but they are comparatively lax compared to those of other countries.

In Switzerland, there is no law compelling VPN services to keep traffic logs, and sharing of data can’t be done casually. Crucially, Golden Frog doesn’t log user web data in the first place.

The VPN service uses OpenVPN, which is widely considered the most reliable and rigorously tested connection protocol.

Recently, VyprVPN also added WireGuard, an emergent VPN protocol with impressive speeds.

VyprVPN also offers a NAT firewall to block any unrequested traffic coming into your device when connected to VyprVPN.

On top of this, it features the all-important kill switch, which stops your IP address leaking if your VPN connection drops momentarily.

Not all VyprVPN’s apps have the same advanced security features, though. For instance, the PC client has a “public wifi protection” option not available on Mac, and the Mac software has split tunneling and a malware blocker, which the Windows app doesn’t have.

We’ve broken down all the features by app later in this review.

VyprDNS

VyprDNS, Golden Frog’s DNS network, is an important element of what makes VyprVPN so secure.

According to VyprVPN, its in-house DNS service holds these benefits:

1. No DNS logs: VyprDNS is “zero-knowledge”: it doesn’t retain logs of hostnames, IP addresses, geolocation data or anything else.
2. No DNS censorship: DNS servers can be used to censor access to specific websites at the request of governments or ISPs, but VyprDNS tunnels your data to prevent this from happening.
3. No DNS location errors: DNS servers located in different countries to your VPN server can cause issues when accessing geo-locked content. VyprDNS avoids this by putting a DNS server in the same country as each VPN server.
4. No injected content: it is technically possible for a DNS provider to inject ads or content into your browser’s DNS requests (Hotspot Shield was caught injecting code into users’ browsers in 2017). VyprVPN DNS servers don’t manipulate any of the content on the websites you visit.

VyprDNS is turned on by default on Windows, macOS, and Android. But you can toggle it off in settings if you’d rather use public DNS servers, instead.

IP and DNS leak test results

We thoroughly tested VyprVPN to check for IP and DNS data leaks.

In short, VyprVPN is leak-proof. Our IP and DNS addresses appeared under German addresses, and our true IP location in London, UK, was never exposed.

Here’s what we found when we ran VyprDNS through a leak test:

Partial leak test, showing 3rd party DNS

As you can see above, the DNS servers aren’t showing up as VyprVPN, or its owners Golden Frog and Powerhouse Management, but as the very companies the service is supposed to help you avoid: Google and Amazon.

We were concerned this meant VyprDNS wasn’t working properly. We reached out to VyprVPN, which clarified that it uses a DNS relay system.

This means that before your DNS traffic reaches any public DNS servers it is routed through a DNS proxy, fully anonymizing your traffic.

This isn’t quite the same as total end-to-end elimination of third parties, but it’s as close to it as possible without alerting websites that a VPN is being used. You can even try this test yourself by checking your DNS servers with our tool.

But that’s just DNS. Here are the results of another, full leak test:

Full VyprVPN leak test.

Encryption tests using Wireshark

These top-level checks are good, and show that VyprVPN wasn’t leaking any other data. However, they don’t guarantee your data is fully encrypted and protected from third parties.

We’ve gone a step further than other review websites, and inspected the packets of data being sent by VyprVPN to make absolutely certain it is properly encrypted.

We use Wireshark to inspect individual packets of data in DNS, TCP, and UDP traffic to make sure absolutely nothing is visible in plain text.

A Wireshark scan of our WiFi showed all traffic was encrypted.

Here are our Wireshark results:

This is an excellent outcome; exactly what we would expect from a top-tier provider like VyprVPN.

Virus and malware checks

It’s important to be extra vigilant, so we also scanned VyprVPN’s apps using Malwarebytes looking for any potentially dangerous or malicious content.

Malwarebytes scan of VyprVPN.

Thankfully, it came out both virus- and malware-free.

Android app permissions

We also analyzed the trackers and permissions within the Android app using the exodus tool.

An exodus report showing VyprVPN’s trackers and permissions.

The results show that the VyprVPN app contains four third-party trackers: Adjust, Google Analytics, Google CrashLytics, and Google Tag Manager.

All the trackers are analytics, so there’s nothing too concerning here, but other services like Astrill have a tracker-free app.

VyprVPN’s Android app also asks for 11 permissions from your phone, including “ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION,” a special permission which allows access to both GPS and network based location.

Some VPNs include this to determine your device’s location and offer a ‘fastest’ connection to the nearest server.

Pinging servers to find the quickest connection is a more private and accurate solution, and doesn’t require using this special permission at all. Hopefully VyprVPN addresses this soon.

VyprVPN used to work in China, but lately it’s been very inconsistent.

In the last month, we haven’t been able to connect once from our test server in Shanghai. In our weekly China VPN tests, it’s only had a 9% success rate in the last quarter.

VyprVPN’s Chameleon protocol and obfuscation tools

The reason why VyprVPN often works in some high-censorship countries is because of its Chameleon protocol.

You can find VyprVPN’s obfuscation protocol in Customize > Protocol.

This VPN protocol is specifically designed to bypass aggressive censorship and VPN blocks in countries like Turkey, China and UAE. It’s currently available on every VPN server, too.

In countries with advanced censorship infrastructure like China’s Great Firewall, just encrypting data is not enough.

These countries run deep packet inspection (DPI) to determine if certain packets of data belong to a VPN. If they detect VPN traffic, they will block the connection.

VyprVPN’s Chameleon protocol works by scrambling the metadata of each OpenVPN packet, preventing it from being identified through DPI. This allows it to avoid detection from governments, ISPs, and other network administrators like your employer, school or university.

Underneath the obfuscation technology lies the unmodified OpenVPN protocol, with tried and tested AES-256 encryption. This means you can overcome censorship without giving up security.

The latest version of the protocol, Chameleon 2.0 has additional compatibility with Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS devices.

We do not recommend relying on VyprVPN’s Chameleon protocol if you are traveling or moving to China.

To measure the impact on our internet speed, we took note of our connection speed before and after connecting to VyprVPN’s servers.

We recorded an average speed loss of 16% when connected to a nearby server, which is an above average result. There have also been big speed improvements on international connections, too.

Upload speeds were really strong, reaching as high as 87.71Mbps. This is an improvement on past test results.

VyprVPN is very reliable, with little fluctuation in speed from one server location to the next. As long as you have a stable internet connection, you shouldn’t have any speed issues.

That said, if speed is your primary concern, there are certainly faster VPNs available.

Ping times of just over 10ms between London and European servers are good, but not enough for us to recommend VyprVPN as a top-rated VPN for online gaming.

Long-distance speed Tests

While same city connections have stayed about the same, international speeds have improved significantly. This is key for streaming video and audio content from abroad.

On almost all connections we saw notable speed improvements for both uploads and downloads. While global speeds have been a past weakness for VyprVPN, this is clearly no longer the case.

VyprVPN is slower than its top rivals

In addition to the above results of our manual testing, below you can see the latest results from our automated VPN speed test tool.

These automated speed tests run every day, four times per day. Test connection speeds are capped at 100Mbps to recreate a typical home internet connection.

The graph below compares VyprVPN’s average loss of internet speed to other popular VPNs, on a New York to New York test connection. The results go back eight weeks, to give you a good idea of how reliable VyprVPN is, not just how fast it can be.

Compare VyprVPN’s worldwide speeds using our tool

Sadly, VyprVPN hasn’t been able to match other top services for several months.

On a New York to New York connection we suffered download speed drops of as much as 50%, compared to drops of less than 10% for VPNs like ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access.

Internationally, the results have been very similar, but VyprVPN has performed surprisingly better on very long-distance connections.

For example, connecting from New York to Singapore, its download speed has stayed above that of Private Internet Access, and is not far behind NordVPN.

VyprVPN’s streaming capabilities have massively improved over the years. It can now unblock several major streaming platforms, which in the past it struggled to stream.

VyprVPN doesn’t work with Netflix

VyprVPN used to unblocks US Netflix on most of its US servers, but it’s fallen victim to the recent Netflix VPN crackdown. Now, VyprVPN unblocks zero Netflix libraries.

Netflix detected VyprVPN and refused us access to the platform.

There are better VPNs that work with Netflix. Some can unblock 32 Netflix regions, like we assessed in our Windscribe tests.

VyprVPN unblocks BBC iPlayer

Historically, we’ve struggled to stream BBC iPlayer using VyprVPN. However, the newest apps currently work well.

VyprVPN gets around BBC iPlayer blocks.

All UK servers worked, which is no easy feat considering lately many top-tier VPNs struggle to stream BBC’s video player.

VyprVPN doesn’t stream Disney+, Hulu, and HBO

VyprVPN doesn’t unblock either Hulu, HBO Max, or Disney+. We have been able to stream DAZN and Amazon Prime Video, though.

The service’s kill switch and first-party DNS servers are great pluses, and protect your real IP address during file-sharing.

Having said that, VyprVPN’s speeds aren’t the fastest and there is no support for port forwarding, either. Devoted torrenters may prefer to use a VPN more suited for P2P activity.

We tested VyprVPN on qBittorrent.

As covered in the logging section of this review, Golden Frog has significantly improved its privacy policy. However, the copyright policy remains broadly unchanged.

At first the two policies seem to hold some conflict. The Copyright Policy states that “it is Golden Frog’s policy:

1. to remove or disable access to the content identified in the notice of claimed infringement;
2. to notify the subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to the content; and
3. to terminate in appropriate circumstances subscribers who are repeat infringers.”

While this policy may appear concerning at first, it’s just ‘for show’ to appease content owners and copyright trolls. VyprVPN “treats all traffic equally” and it doesn’t log IP addresses or connection times.

Since VyprVPN’s privacy policy updates, we haven’t seen or heard of any customer receiving DMCA notices, or having their account locked for downloading copyrighted material.

VyprVPN has online support resources in multiple languages, including: Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Less impressive is the scope of those resources. Compared to other VPN services, VyprVPN’s online resources are pretty poor. There are no video tutorials and there’s not much in-depth advice on advanced issues.

The VPN setup guides on VyprVPN’s website are very useful, though.

Getting in touch via the 24/7 live chat is by far the best way to get help from VyprVPN. Responses can take a few minutes, but the customer support agents are always clear, helpful and friendly.

We spoke to VyprVPN about streaming with the VPN.