PureVPN Review

This makes a VPN very attractive for privacy and security purposes. The most common use case for a VPN is when someone connects to a private network at their workplace to access a files on a work computer. Unlike the office VPN scenario however, a retail VPN like PureVPN, allows us to connect to their private network of servers to actually securely access the internet itself.

Bottom Line:

My review of PureVPN found it to be a solid performer domestically, but isn’t the best internationally speed wise. They give users a nice mix of advanced and user-friendly features.

PureVPN is a virtual private network service used to protect your browsing habits online. Price wise, PureVPN is affordable, with rates starting at $2.45. Quality wise, PureVPN is middle of the road in terms of speed and overall performance when compared with other VPN providers, such as IPVanish.

Getting Started:

Once I completed the install (which took a while), I ran the PureVPN app. The PureVPN interface has a login towards the top of the window, along with a drop down to select the protocol to use to secure my VPN connection: PPTP, SSTP, and L2TP. PPTP is probably the most recognizable. Most VPN services offer low end encryption protocols like PPTP, all the way up to top level encryption protocols like OpenVPN. I was shocked to discover that PureVPN did not offer the OpenVPN protocol - this was definitely a disappointment because that throws the possibility of higher levels of encryption right out the window.

The server drop down (in the “rest of the world” version) lists “fastest servers” across 21 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Panama, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Within the U.S., I could chose between servers in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Washington, Chicago, Miami, and Sayreville, NJ.

I entered my login credentials, hit connect, and I was off and running. It’s not as stress-free as IPVanish, but it’s still pretty straightforward as VPNs go.

Once I was connected, I could see my connection status, my new PureVPN IP address, and the time connected the upper right corner of the interface. I could also see a network traffic chart, showing me how much bandwidth I was using while connected. This would be useful if you had a bandwidth cap, but PureVPN does not.

Speed and Performance:

I did some pretty basic testing first, just doing some normal everyday surfing to sites like ebay, Pandora and Spotify and I didn’t notice any performance issues from these low bandwidth services while connected to servers in cities close to my actual location.

I then decided to step things up a bit and watch some streaming video. I watched Amazon Prime and Netflix HD. Performance on these two services was acceptable although I did have to wait for the initial buffering of the video which didn’t seem to be as fast as other services. Watching an overseas service like the BBC however, was an entirely different story. Simply put, the bandwidth just wasn’t there and there was a lot of buffering making things basically unwatchable.

To get a good sense of the actual performance, I decided to run speed tests on www.speedtest.net.The tests measure download and upload speeds when connecting to servers in different cities. I connected to a server, and then looked for a server closest to that location on SpeedTest to run the tests. I ran the test twice with the VPN turned off, and again while the VPN was turned on, and picked the best results.Since the list was so long, I tested the servers in the U.S., Malaysia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey.

As we said earlier, the speeds are middle of the road, they aren’t terrible, but they aren’t fantastic either when compared to top performers like IPVanish. PureVPN is great for lower bandwidth services and domestic services, but if overseas consumption is what you are looking for, PureVPN might not be first choice.