AirVPN Vs HideMyAss: 7 Tests To Decide “Who’s Top” In 2022?

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Do you wish to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the best solution for you if yes.

While anyone can claim to be distinct these days, when it concerns VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, stating, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can declare to be special these days, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of 2 lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

Throughout the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger business either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is explained and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.

AirVPN takes the non-traditional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up versus its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than most, with only 246 servers spread throughout 23 nations.

Most servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the absence of variety of servers lowers the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is popular for its exceptional performance across its server network, with numerous nations having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to offer a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most safe and reliable way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.

Numerous ports and protocols are available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. In addition, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget PPTP and other risky protocols.

No preference is given to any protocol, service, or application when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is maintained. Notably, you can overcome internet constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic constraints, and traffic shaping.

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it automatically improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely trusted. The absence of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, but it will not put the newer protocol totally in place up until some of its technical and personal privacy problems are attended to.

AirVPN has likewise included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out things.

Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can quickly switch servers as often as you like.

You can keep track of the current load on each server, any existing concerns, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).

There is a detailed specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.

All of it is nice, however since there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being offered will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A nice thing about this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before signing up. You don’t have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?

The company is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the outright top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no individual details logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN does not track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It just gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and enhance services, but you can request for this info to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can tell what kind of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi network without worrying about your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping techniques will fail versus AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also say they stick to EU personal privacy guidelines which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very same or greater levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can use it to discover who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection supplied.

If your ISP or country blocks OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.

Open-source clients and a lively community forum enable you to get a sense of what existing users are saying about the service prior to registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This suggests that anyone can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been inspected by a third party.

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best offered. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth mentioning. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The main information channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real e-mail address. That’s great because it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But know that you will not have the ability to change your account’s password if you do not use one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence data). However even if the government requested for user info, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, offered on all significant platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, in spite of Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the details you need to connect to a VPN.

There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a heap of download options. There are builds for different running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to describe what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing doesn’t operate on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. When you’re finished, you simply click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more since AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two essential AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system launches, however you can’t select which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.

Even though it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure tunnel. Most standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

Eddie’s layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview just displays the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.

The Servers page shows all available servers in the network, together with in-depth info about every one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your place, and existing users and server load. Excellent stuff!

This tab also has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.

The Countries page shows the variety of servers offered in each nation at a glimpse, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also revealed. Lots of servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller sized ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.

A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might pick as lots of nations as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that nation will be eliminated, effectively making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.

By choosing a country, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and choose the server you want in a specific country. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s likewise a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab shows an easy throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.

While a lot of apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, current user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information uploaded and downloaded, and far more.

Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the information they might ever want about the various locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a detailed record of connections, routes, and other data.

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables you to tweak the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really proficient user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface by means of the Logs pane.

If the huge function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be tough to determine what particular settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program normally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings until you look for them. If you sometimes long for power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t want to utilize Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software supplies the exact same substantial setup choices as its desktop sibling and useful status details.

Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and pick a specific city on the very same page. Some practical text additions make the information more easy to understand, but it’s still quite difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than many people will ever need. The software also tries a little more to help you, with additional text subtitles to discuss what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN typically connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of privacy, leak tests revealed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which reveals that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition because AirVPN only supports OpenVPN.

Reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. One stated there wasn’t a single nation where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually remarkable overall.

While it wasn’t quite at the top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and scenarios like HD video gaming, streaming, and video conferencing definitely won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server locations. This might restrict the ease of access of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for many people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. However, it appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix seldom work, and when they do, discovering the right server requires prolonged experimentation. This is most likely because, unlike other providers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

Luckily, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can inspect to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.

Streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN excels, merely because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Allow P2P?

Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Simply connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can use port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Numerous applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely convenient, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually revealed torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN uses a wider range of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 gadgets all at once, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.

This makes it an outstanding choice for individuals who live in a family house or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Rates differs based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. Many plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer memberships offer the best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be easily converted to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

The existing plans available are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month

Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month

One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month

Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month

Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month

AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide alternatives are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing the coupon code they send you.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than lots of other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it offers e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a very active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t contracted out but can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get a reaction. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the agents are valuable and friendly, however the extensive responses can be quite technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a lot of info, including a big FAQs section that is separated by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several topics, but beginners will have the same problems understanding a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little loss.

Unlimited P2P allowed with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on servers and apps alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.

Network Lock/Kill Switch.

Split tunneling.

Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.

Supports Tor over VPN.

Easy app installation and use.

Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.

Strong Customer Support.

Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.

Great rates, particularly for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists protect you from ads, adware, trackers, and damaging sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very easy to use or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm more recent users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are too many advanced alternatives.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with good prices. It’s clearly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN provider. However even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to use if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and better results than many of its competing VPN rivals.

When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more focused on safeguarding your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

It might not guarantee the exact same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great choice for consumers who value their privacy.

While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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