This BlackVPN review will help you better understand the Hong Kong-based VPN provider. While they are a very small provider, with just 31 servers, they are actually pretty decent in most other things. Their size, however, will always hold them back when compared to the best VPNs with thousands of servers.
They have done some great work putting together their network with bare-metal servers of their own, rather than cloud servers. They also guarantee to have no virtual locations and that all servers are actually physically in the countries they claim to be in. They are somewhat torrent-friendly, outside of the 14 eyes jurisdiction, and keep no logs.
Those are all great things, but they stumble in two areas. We have already talked about their very small number of servers, but it is also worth noting that while they are outside of the 14 eyes countries, they are in Hong Kong which is controlled by China. Some of the strictest laws governing the Internet happen in China, with monitoring and censorship being frequent. Those two facts make it hard for us to really recommend them instead of the Top 10 VPN Providers on our list.
Black VPN really impresses us with their list of features, especially for such a small provider. They also are setup for use on BlackVPN with Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Linux, Android and routers.
The problem is their payment structure. The features which you get depend on the plan that you sign up for. Lower plans have fewer features, while the most expensive have the most:
This pricing and feature structure is very unusual. Most VPN providers will allow for every feature to be accessed and pricing will change depending on the length of the contract.
They do offer some decent features though:
These are great features which are all available to every payment plan.
This may be BlackVPN’s biggest weakness as they only have a total of 31 servers at the time of this review. They’re in 18 countries with 20 VPN location (The USA gets 3 locations, so it’s one location per country).
Those countries include:
There are certainly some locations in there which help, but with such a small footprint in Asia and South America, and no servers in all of Africa, they simply do not have the server network of a high-quality provider.
BlackVPN make a claim on their website, then link to their Twitter, about claimed VPN speeds of users. This data is all at least two years old, according to the tweet datestamps, but they do show some interesting details:
We looked through their tweet history and found many similarities between all their data: These are just spikes in an otherwise average showing of performance.
Blakc VPN has one of the most complex pricing structures we’ve seen. As we stated in the features section, they break their pricing down based on what features you want:
These prices are in Euros, converted to USD at the time of writing, and their Global plan is $110.
For comparison, one of the top VPNs is IPVanish, and they charge $77 per year – and they’re not even the best-priced VPN we review!
That’s not all as they then break down each feature by term lengths, just to make things even more confusing:
Absolutely convoluted and overpriced. See a VPN like Private Internet Access for a great price and even more features than BlackVPN.
This is another weak aspect of BlackVPN’s service. They have no live chat, which is a hallmark of a truly great VPN. What they do have is:
The PGP/GPG key is interesting for those who know how to use it, but whatever happened to an old fashioned email address for support?
When visiting their Terms of Service page, they make something clear right off the top, that they keep:
They then also clearly state that they can see when a user connects and how much bandwidth they use, but that this is erased when the user disconnects. They also keep your email address and payment records. Their no-log policy is solid.
They state that they do not log anything, but will work with law enforcement if given the correct subpoena. If they truly log nothing then they will have nothing to give to the police. They operate in Hong Kong and follow the laws governed there. Again, Hong Kong is under China’s jurisdiction, so be cautious in how much trust you put into this.
Refunds are given within 14 days of the purchase, no questions asked. Those whose accounts are terminated for violating their terms of service will not get a refund. Violations include:
They also state that downloading copyrighted material is against their ToS, and they could track the user responsible and ban them if they get too many DMCA notices.
BlackVPN looks like a great VPN on the surface, but further digging makes us not particularly fond of them. Namely:
This BlackVPN review was tough to write as they looked good at first glance, but the more we looked the more we found aspects of their service which we did not like. We can not recommend them at this time, and urge you to look at our list of the Top 5 VPN Providers instead.
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Our ratings for blackvpn review are based on our professional experience and extensive tests with VPN providers between April 2014 – July 2014, taking into account user feedback and reviews we receive. As a friendly disclosure, some VPN providers do compensate us for customers we refer them, but this in no way effects their ranking on our website, nor our reviews.
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