NordVPN Review

About NordVPN

It’s easy to see why NordVPN are one of the top VPN providers in the field. With a no nonsense client, fast servers and competitive pricing they have to be in any ones top 5 possible solutions. There is little to fault about their service aside from a few niggles like the battery intensive android app and sluggish connection times. Based in Panama outside the reach of 5 eyes with a comprehensive and independently audited no logging policy. Additionally with crypto currency payments, privacy is is clearly high on the agenda

The clients don’t offer you all of the connectivity options that maybe some of the more niche providers do. It’s OpenVPN:AES-256GCM on the windows like and IkEv2/IPSec on mac & iOS. This simplicity is great for the average user who just wants to log in and get the best possible encryption available today.

We would like to see an option of IKEv2/IPSec on the android client as the app is currently very battery intensive. Fortunately this worked around by using a client like StrongSwan which utilises IKEv2/IPSec and significantly reduces the strain on the phone.

Pricing

NordVPN’s pricing is simple with just four options and one bolt on. The monthly plan is quite expensive at nearly $12 while the yearly and two year plans are competitive. The 3 year plan offers a significant saving of 70% if you are prepared to pay upfront. While this does make for an attractive offer we are not sure we would recommend signing up to anything for three years.

There are a good selection of payment options but no Paypal. “We decided to stop supporting payments via PayPal so that we can have more control over your purchase experience. Now we can provide a unified payment system hosted on our website instead of a third party. We manage all customer data and recurring subscriptions by ourselves, which allows us to reduce security risks.” this makes NordVPN the only provider who don’t accept this gateway.

Crypto currencies are processed via CoinPayments. Accepted coins are BTC, DASH, LTC, BTT, ETH, TRX, XMR, ZEC & XRP. For this you only need provide an email address which is what we’d expect from any provider these days. Unfortunately there is no option for gift cards.

NordVPN also offer a dedicated IP address for an additional $5.83 a month.

Security & Privacy

At the present time OpenVPN:AES-256GCM is the industry standard and the only way to connect via the Windows client. You should expect this level of encryption from any provider.

NordVPN provide various types of server to connect to

• Obfuscated - During tests NordVPN’s obfuscated servers were able to bypass a corporate firewall within a UK local authority. Something not many others have been able to achieve.
• Dedicated IP - The dedicated IP servers work well for streaming where we had good results with iPlayer in the UK. Clearing your cookies locally resolves most playback issues. As a result of streaming services constant battle with VPN providers this isn’t guaranteed to work every time so you may need to try a few different servers before you can play back the desired content.
• P2P - NordVPN run separate servers for p2p traffic. This is so the large amount of traffic cased by filesharing doesn’t impact on the experience of customers streaming and browsing.
• Double VPN - Or Multihop VPN connects you to two different servers, doing so encrypts your data twice.
• Onion Over VPN - This Connects to the VPN server. When your data travels to the internet it routes through the server then through the onion network before reaching the desired location.

Other key features that you should find all services provide are

• Killswitch - activating the killswitch should block all internet traffic from your device. We tested this on both android and Windows without any issue
• Anti Malware - Cybersec is NordVPN’s solution. Its as a part anti malware, Ad blocker and will block you device from participating in a DDoS attack.

One thing we would have liked to see is some kind of restricted app feature to allow the customer to bypass the VPN for certain apps or executables.

Testing the DNS resulted in no leaks

Feedback

We asked all the VPN Providers reviewed to answer the following questions, here’s what Laura at NordVPN said to us.

Speed

Overall speed is excellent. We tested servers in the UK and Netherlands. Also tested were Malaysia, Spain, Romania, Iceland and Switzerland for their respective privacy laws. You can find our reasons for choosing these countries here.

We’ve run these tests a few times and the only country that struggles is Malaysia. One thing that is significantly noticeable is that if your PC goes sleep at night like ours do there’s quite a wait the the client to reconnect when it wakes up and you log back.

Conclusion