VyprVPN Review

A few years ago, VyprVPN’s logging policy far exceeded what we considered reasonable. It used to collect your real IP address, newly assigned IP address, timestamps, and bandwidth usage for 30 days.

It then implemented a strict no-logs policy under Golden Frog’s leadership. However, this is no longer applicable as the VPN is now owned by Certida, a Texas-based company.

The new owners moved operations to the privacy-unfriendly US, removed its VPN privacy policy, and replaced it with a generic, auto-generated privacy policy for the website — not for the VPN service.

We contacted VyprVPN for clarification, and disappointingly discovered it doesn’t plan to release a new privacy policy, logging audit, or transparency report anytime soon.

Here’s a table listing exactly what VyprVPN logs and does not log:

You should never trust a VPN that uses an auto-generated privacy policy. You should also never trust a VPN that doesn’t list out exactly what it logs and how long for.

We reached out to VyprVPN to ask why there isn’t a privacy policy for the VPN service. A Certida representative replied:

There’s no specific policy for no-log as it clearly means nothing is logged. I guess we could write a longer statement but we don’t see the value.

In reality, a lot of no-logs VPNs collect some sort of data, whether it’s a username and password or aggregated bandwidth data to reduce server load. A lack of transparency about this is extremely worrying and almost unheard of from a trusted VPN.

VyprVPN does have some privacy initiatives that we like to see, though. Its VPN servers are all self-hosted and operated internally, meaning they aren’t rented by a third party. This makes VyprVPN less vulnerable to third parties interfering with the company’s logging practices.

2018 Logging Policy Audit

VyprVPN was one of the first VPNs to commission an independent logging policy audit in 2018, addressing the issues that were identified promptly.

However, 6 years have passed since that audit. Unlike other VPNs that conduct yearly logging policy audits, VyprVPN’s next audit is long overdue.

Given the significant change in ownership and jurisdiction during this time, there’s a possibility that VyprVPN has completely changed its logging practices.

Without a new audit, there’s no way to tell whether VyprVPN is still a no-logs VPN.

In our speed tests, we connected to VyprVPN servers in five different continents. We usually test across six continents, but VyprVPN doesn’t have a server in South Africa.

We use a 100Mbps internet connection, designed to be similar to your baseline speed at home.

Here’s a table showing VyprVPN’s speed test results:

VyprVPN has consistently fast speeds, with minimal speed loss of just 4%. As long as you have a stable internet connection, you shouldn’t have any speed issues.

While global speeds have been a past weakness for VyprVPN, this is clearly no longer the case. On all connections across continents, we recorded speeds of above 76Mbps.

We saw the biggest speed loss when connecting to Australia, but this is to be expected as the server is further away.

To put its performance in context, you can see how VyprVPN’s local speeds compare to other top-tier VPNs in the table below:

As you can see in the chart above, VyprVPN holds up extremely well against the fastest VPNs on connections in the US. It’s one of the fastest VPNs on the market and can be relied on for streaming, torrenting, and casual browsing.

But if fast long-distance speeds your priority, there are faster VPNs available.

Low Ping for Gaming (But Only On Nearby Servers)

Local ping times of 7ms are decent for gaming, but not good enough to be a top-rated VPN for online gaming.

We also wouldn’t recommend using VyprVPN to game on a long-distance connection. We recorded an average 128ms ping time on international connections and 76ms connecting to the UK.

Below is a table showing all the VPN protocols, encryption ciphers, and other technical features that VyprVPN offers:

VyprVPN automatically uses the WireGuard protocol on every platform, which is fast, secure, and open-source. Previously, the VPN used to automatically enable IKEv2 on mobile and OpenVPN on desktop.

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

Not all of VyprVPN’s apps have the same advanced security features, though. For instance, VyprVPN’s iOS app doesn’t feature a kill switch and its PC client has a Public WiFi Protection option that’s not available on Mac.

The macOS app also has split tunneling and a malware blocker, which isn’t available on the Windows app.

VyprVPN Owns its Entire VPN Server Network

VyprVPN owns and operates all its VPN servers. Having almost no third-parties involved is one of VyprVPN’s biggest selling points as it is extremely rare for a mid-tier VPN to offer a self-hosted VPN server network.

This is better than most providers but still not as good as ExpressVPN and IPVanish, which use first-party DNS servers.

Furthermore, VyprVPN advertises itself as completely eliminating third-parties, when actually it still uses third-party DNS servers as an endpoint, like a majority of other VPNs.

It’s nonetheless a strong step towards privacy by design, as it eliminates the security risks associated with renting VPN servers.

Trustworthy Kill Switch Stops IP Address Leaks

VyprVPN offers a kill switch Windows, macOS, Android, Android TV, and Amazon Fire TV — but not on iOS. In our kill switch tests, VyprVPN successfully prevented our real IP address from leaking.

It worked when our connection dropped altogether, and also when we switched servers from France to Greece. During these windows of time when our real IP could be leaked, VyprVPN successfully blocked our internet traffic.

Remember to manually turn off the VPN kill switch if you want to reconnect to the internet without VyprVPN connected.

VyprVPN Passed Our IP Address, DNS, & WebRTC Leak Tests

Our IP and DNS leak tests proved that VyprVPN is leak-proof. When connected to a VyprVPN server, our IP address appeared under German addresses, and our true IP location was never exposed.

VyprDNS uses a DNS relay system to prevent your DNS query from being associated with VyprVPN, and prevent websites from knowing you’re using a VPN.

When we tested for VyprDNS’ servers, it showed us the last DNS server in the relay was an Amazon DNS server.

As you can see above, the DNS servers aren’t showing as VyprVPN, or its owners Golden Frog and Certida.

VyprVPN clarified in an email 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, as VyprVPN seems to be leasing third-party DNS servers, but it’s still as close to it as possible without alerting websites that a VPN is being used.

Secure AES-256 encryption

We used Wireshark, a packet-sniffing tool, to inspect traffic being encrypted by our VyprVPN connection.

Our tests showed that VyprVPN successfully encrypted web traffic. The unintelligible text in the screenshot above is exactly what anyone attempting to hack your connection would see while you use VyprVPN.

Technical Features We’d Like to See

Compared to some of its rivals, VyprVPN is lacking some key technical features. Here’s a list of some features we’d like to see introduced:

VyprVPN’s streaming capabilities have improved over the years. It can now unblock several major streaming platforms, which it could not do just two years ago.

However, it still doesn’t compare to top tier VPNs like ExpressVPN and NordVPN when it comes to streaming.

Tested: VyprVPN Doesn’t Work with US Netflix

VyprVPN only unblocks two Netflix libraries: Canada and Germany. This is extremely poor compared to some of its rivals, like ExpressVPN and NordVPN, which both unblock at least 15 Netflix libraries — including US and UK content.

There are better VPNs that work with Netflix. Some can unblock 32 Netflix regions, like we found 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.

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

We were also able to stream Channel 4 content using VyprVPN’s UK servers, but it failed to access ITVX.

VyprVPN Doesn’t Stream Hulu

Our most recent tests confirmed that VyprVPN still isn’t able to stream Hulu.

Nevertheless, we are glad to see its streaming capabilities improve somewhat over time, as we are now also able to stream Max and US Disney+ with VyprVPN.

VyprVPN used to work in China, but lately it’s been very inconsistent. In our China VPN tests, we found it only had a 3% success rate in the past year.

In comparison, Hide.me has had a 84% success rate and only costs $2.69 per month on its best-value subscription.

VyprVPN’s Chameleon Protocol & Obfuscation Tools

VyprVPN can unblock websites in some high-censorship countries because of its Chameleon 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 with every VPN server, too.

VyprVPN’s Chameleon protocol works by scrambling the metadata of each OpenVPN packet, preventing it from being identified through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

This should allow 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 sacrificing security.

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

Here’s a quick summary of showing how VyprVPN performed in our torrenting tests:

Torrenting Attribute	Result
Average Download Bitrate	5.6MiB/s
No. of P2P Servers	700+
Logging Policy	Unknown
Kill Switch	Yes
Port Forwarding	No

VyprVPN’s kill switch and first-party VPN servers are great additions, both of which protect your real IP address during file-sharing on Windows and macOS.

Having said that, VyprVPN’s torrenting speeds aren’t the fastest and there is no support for port forwarding, either. This is a real surprise given how fast the VPN is when handling typical web traffic.

If you’re a devoted torrenter then you may prefer to use a VPN that’s more suited to P2P activity, like Private Internet Access.

We also found an isolated incident of someone being flagged for DMCA violations while using VyprVPN in 2022. In this case, however, it seems the user didn’t configure VyprVPN and qBittorrent properly.

What this revealed is that it’s possible to receive a DMCA when connected to VyprVPN if you don’t configure the app properly. We’re also reluctant to recommend the VPN for any P2P activity when it does not have a clear and transparent privacy policy.

If you’re a frequent torrenter, it’s worth checking out better VPNs for torrenting.

You can contact VyprVPN’s customer support team in the following ways:

Getting in touch via the 24/7 live chat is by far the best way to get help from VyprVPN. You can request a human immediately, and we’ve never encountered a queue of more than two people.

We found the quality of responses are hit-or-miss, though. We’ve seen some frustratingly scripted and confusing responses to our queries.

Compared to other top VPN services, VyprVPN’s online resources are great. It has an organized, easy-to-navigate help center, full of guides on how to set up VyprVPN on your device, FAQs, and how to manage your account details.

We are also glad to see VyprVPN has online support resources in multiple languages:

• Chinese
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Turkish