The first thing that grabbed our attention, when reviewing VPNGates, was its experience, as it’s been operating since 2007. A VPN that has lasted so long in the market is usually promising, yet sadly, we found VPNGates lacked several of the key features you’d expect from a quality VPN.
If you’re looking for a VPN with a more well rounded resume, we’d suggest looking at our review on ExpressVPN instead.
Starting with security, VPNGates secures its network of servers with a high-level encryption implemented through multiple security protocols. These protocols include OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP/IPSec, and IKEv2. Unfortunately, they still lack the essential security and privacy features of a kill switch and double VPN.
We noticed that this VPN was more focused on online freedom than security and privacy as it is able to operate out of challenging countries such as the Middle East while also bypassing online restrictions. This is fantastic, however, in our opinion in order to be considered a truly great VPN it should have mastered the security and privacy aspects as well.
Hopefully, VPNGates will someday use the same level of commitment it has for online freedom to help improve its weak points in privacy and security. Aside from that, we found VPNGates to be an amazing provider for its users.
Speed determines how fast content uploads, so if you’re torrenting or streaming, you want the speed to be somewhat identical to your regular internet speed. Since a VPN encrypts your data, it usually takes a bit longer to send your data back and forth, which can slow down your connection. However, if your ISP deliberately slows down your connection (also known as throttling) a VPN might increase your internet speed. Testing a VPN is somewhat pointless because new servers pop up and affect speed. Your speed can also differ according to your location, so your speed test might not match ours. Having said that, we tested the speed in numerous locations to provide you with the average.
VPNGates has 60 servers in 10 countries.
Compared to other VPN providers that provide a user-friendly client software, VPNGates doesn’t have the best user experience.
First of all, there is no client software, so if you want to connect to a server, you’d have to set up this connection manually on your system. But before going into details, let’s talk more about the signing up process.
When we accessed its limited website, we were glad to find that VPNGates offers a free trial. When we went forward with the registration and provided the information required, we never received the confirmation email with our account details.
This shows that VPNGates doesn’t have a very responsive customer support team. We don’t want to throw a judgment at the company that this trial is non-existent and we’ll just assume that the company had some “technical difficulties” preventing us from receiving the email. We decided to skip this step and move forward to give them another chance.
Well, there isn’t much that can be said except that at least we found manual configuration tutorials on the website and to be fair, these tutorials were pretty clear and easy to follow. We’re actually shocked we would have such a poor experience with such an experienced provider.
We personally test the customer support team of every VPN we review. This means asking technical question through the live chat feature (where applicable) and measuring the response time for email questions. Whether you need to connect to a specific server, change your security protocol, or configure a VPN on your router, finding a VPN with quality customer support should be important to you.
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