Hotspot Shield 2022 review: New owners, fantastic speeds, slightly better privacy - garciaeary1996

P2P allowed: Yes Business location: Tied States Number of servers: 3,200+* Number of commonwealth locations: 82 Cost: $95.88 per yr VPN communications protocol: Classic TLS1.2 / DTLS1.2 tunnel using OpenSSL 1.1 library Data encoding: AES-GCM (128 and 256 tur) and ChaCha-poly1305 supported Information assay-mark: All subsidized ciphersuites execute authenticated encryption using an AEAD pattern . Handshake: Standard TLS1.2/DTLS1.2

What a difference of opinion nearly 2 years makes. We last looked at Hotspot Shield in early 2018, and now at the end of 2019 there are some serious changes. Hot spot Shield is at present closely-held away a unexampled parent company called Pango, which offers a subscription security bundle that includes Hotspot Shield, 1Password, Identity Guard, and Robo Shield for $13 per month. You dismiss still get a standalone Hotspot Shield subscription, however.

Along with the managerial changes the Hotspot Shield privacy policy has been tweaked, the desktop app had an redevelopment, and the general product has more servers, more country options, and new pricing.

Note: This review is part of our best VPNs roundup. Go in that location for details about competing products and how we tested them.

Features and services

hssdashboard — The rising Hotspot Shield internal screen.

When you start Hot spot Shield it shows the in real time-informed navy blue background with a elephantine mightiness button in the concentrate of the window. The app window is smaller now, and the default option screen includes two tiles below the powerfulness button. One is for choosing your location, and the opposite displays your cumulative information utilisation.

The big button used to be the only matter on the default start page. Adding the Hotspot Shield country list is a nice transfer, allowing you to selection from complete 82 countries.

That commonwealth count is quite a step from the measly 25 that Hotspot Shield had last time around; withal, Pango says some of its country locations use virtual servers, where the physical server isn't actually in the country IT claims to be. Presently HSS uses natural science servers in 22 countries: the Integrated States, U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Nederland, Soviet Russia, Singapore, South Korea, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Ukraine.

Hotspot Harbor's total server number is now more than 3,200, way upfield from 2,000 the last time we looked at it.

hsscountrylists — Hotspot Shield's country listings.

The new Hot spot Shield has a dedicated page display your currently selected country, a quick-access section, and then a listing of all countries.

On the left side of the app are a number of menu items in a very little left rail off. Click the "hamburger" menu picture to reveal the name calling of each menu token.

The menu hasn't changed too much. The main options users will need on a regular basis include the default Home section, as well as Settings. The Help section also has quick links to period chat support, and trouble ticketing for premium users.

The settings area has a hardly a new items. There's now an internet kill substitution, which we didn't see last time around. This lineament stops all web dealings if the VPN connexion crashes until you reconnect to the VPN. There's also a "web domain bypass," which lets you visit some websites remote of the VPN connection. As with last clip, I could get Hotspot Shield to work with Netflix (allowing me to view overseas Netflix catalogs), and Hotspot Shield says support for U.S. Netflix is now an official feature. That's great newsworthiness for travelers or people World Health Organization often watch Netflix happening public Wi-Fi hotspots.

In one case you've got the VPN up and running the display is very similar to what we byword ahead, just in a more compressed format. The app displays bitty informational tiles that demonstrate your VPN location, the VPN IP address you're using, and the amount of bandwidth you've used sledding up and down, plus the name of the topical anesthetic web you'ray currently on. These tiles give birth some nice new changes. The server information tile, for example, shows your Information processing address, the load of the server (as a percentage), and the topical latency. The information tile shows how much data is expiration skyward and down, and now displays that along a graph. Finally, there's a new vizor-travel rapidly roofing tile showing exactly that.

Hotspot Shield is a lot more expensive than IT was. Last prison term we looked it was $72 p.a., which was already high, merely now it's pushing close to $100 per year, at $95.88. There's as wel a two-year plan at $167.76 and a month-to-month plant at $13. Hotspot Shield allows up to quintet simultaneous connections per account.

Public presentation

hssactiveconnection — A live connection with Hotspot Shield.

Just like last time around, Hot spot Shield is secured. In our tests, the VPN retained more 72 percent of the base download upper, averaged over 3 days of testing. That's such faster than the 64 percent we saw last time, but there was one day with an unusually high final result that May have skewed the results.

Regardless, Hotspot Screen is stock-still blistering decent to stay our pick for fastest VPN speed, with other comfortably-proverbial VPN services such as ExpressVPN and Mullvad coming in way behind.

Eastern Samoa wonted, remember that speed tests derriere vary quite a lot, and your mileage Crataegus laevigata vary depending along your ISP's speeds, router, Personal computer, and other equipment.

Privacy, namelessness, and entrust

As with former Hotspot Carapace possessor AnchorFree, Pango's military headquarters are in Redwood City, Calif.. The CEO is Sujay Jaswa and the COO is Tony Huie.

Hot spot Shield still requires an email address and password to sign upwards. That's not terrible and within reason measure for VPNs. Payments are also standard, as before, requiring a credit or debit card, or PayPal. There are no options for cryptocurrencies surgery cash.

hsssettings — Hotspot Shield's settings covert.

The privacy policy has developed, but IT's still not as good as other services. Pango does not collect device information (though it does this for opposite products), simply IT standing collects the domains you chitchat. Non the particularised URLs, mind you, right the domains. AnchorFree says these domain visits are never connected to your account and cannot live tied to you. "We do not know which user accessed which domain…We do this to monitor lizard, support and optimise our VPN services," reported to the Pango VPN privacy policy.

In plus to the domains, Hotspot Shield also creates a hash supported your device attributes and uses that to measure bandwidth use, provide support, analytics, and so on. Pango says it uses a hash because it does not "require users to cross-file an invoice to use both of our products and need a way to distinguish between different users and carry outer the activities above." Your IP address is likewise unbroken (in an encrypted state) during your VPN session and so deleted. Finally, the keep company also collects the duration of your sessions and bandwidth consumption. Pango says it does this "to reminder, confirm and optimize our VPN services, as well as apply free app usage limits."

Conclusion

Pango's privacy insurance policy is probably fine if your only involved in securing your connection for those times you're connected public Wi-Fi connections. If, however, your primary concern is secrecy Oregon gaining atomic number 3 untold anonymity as you give the sack realistically get online, there are other VPN services that log far less data.

It's granitelike to argue with those speed results, however. If your only concern is getting the fastest VPN possible and then you should test Hotspot Harbour for yourself.

*Hotspot Shield uses virtual server locations where the physical host behaves American Samoa if it's in one country but is actually in another.

Editor's note: Because online services are often reiterative, gaining radical features and carrying out improvements ended time, this review is open to change in order to accurately reflect the present-day state of the service. Any changes to text or our final reexaminatio finding of fact will be noted at the top of this clause.