Hotspot Shield’s monthly price of $12.99 is more than any other VPN we reviewed. An option to purchase a 1-year subscription can be taken. The Premium Family subscription costs $143.88 annually and the Premium Premium subscription costs $95.88. That’s a significant amount compared to the $71.93 average for other services that we tested. At the very least, we recommend that readers avoid subscriptions for long periods of time. It is not possible to know for sure if a VPN works until you actually try it. Get the temporary deal, or the free one and see if you love it.

Other standalone VPNs come in significantly less costly than Hotspot Shield.

Mullvad is an Editors’ choice winner and costs just EUR5 per month ($5.55 US at the time.) Also, you get a restricted Proton. You can get a VPN account for as low as $5 per monthly

You can pay for a Hotspot Shield subscription by using a major credit card or Pay. Pay with PayPal. Other services offer more privacy-friendly options. Proton. VPN, Mullvad (Editors’ Choice winner IVPN) accept cash mail-ins to their corporate headquarters. Cryptocurrency support is also fairly common among VPNs, but it’s not an option with Hotspot Shield.

Hotspot Shield offers Bit. The network supports torrenting. A split-tunneling option allows you control which traffic travels through the tunnel. This feature is great for streaming video and using banks that often block VPN traffic.

Hotspot Shield offers a premium subscription that allows you to connect up to five devices simultaneously. This is the average of all VPNs tested. That seems to be changing, however. There are many competitors that offer better services, while others have eliminated this limit altogether. Avira Phantom VPN, Encrypt.me VPN , Ghostery Midnight, Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN all place no limit on the number of simultaneous connections.

(Editor’s note: Encrypt.me, owned by J2 Global and Ziff Davis is publisher of PCMag.com, is part of J2 Global. Hotspot Shield is not able to access the Tor anonymization networks. This is okay as you do not need to use a VPN in order to get free access the anonymization network. Hotspot Shield does not include multihop connections. These routes your traffic through another server to increase security. Nord is the winner of Editors Choice. Proton. VPNs offer such rare but very useful features.

With a paid Hotspot Shield VPN subscription, you get free subscriptions for 1Password password manager , Robo Shield call blocker, and Identity Guard identity theft protection service. Hotspot Shield’s parent company recently introduced an optional antivirus product for purchase, which costs $5.99 per months or $39.99 per calendar year.

Aura acquired Hotspot Shield and now provides these extra services. While the previous branding, called Pango, has disappeared, the services appear to remain the same. I was assured by a representative that these services will continue to be available as long as customers have Hotspot Shield accounts.

Although this review is focused on Hotspot Shield standalone, it’s hard to overlook the large bundle. Hotspot Shield’s bundle is expensive and could easily be placed in the same group as security packages that include a VPN. Proton. VPN is Proton’s sister. Mail as well as a variety of privacy-oriented tools. Editors’ Choice winner Tunnel. Nord, like Bear, offers a password manager. VPN also includes an encrypted file storage. This is because most VPN services add to your VPN subscription cost, while Hotspot Shield comes with everything.

Open. VPN is the best way to establish a VPN connection. A new player, Wire. Guard utilizes newer encryption technology that seems to deliver faster speeds. Hotspot Shield doesn’t support this technology on Linux and it is not yet widespread. This is fine for the moment, Wire. Guard could soon become the industry standard.

Hotspot Shield’s own protocol was created, Catapult Hydra. This protocol is used to power Hotspot Shield until now. The company did not create an entirely new encryption protocol. A new encryption protocol would require an enormous amount of scrutiny since an undiscovered flaw could be used to break it. Catapult Hydra uses Open SSL to encrypt data. The company representative stated that the protocol was simply an enhancement of existing transport protocols. Hydra is a multichannel data transport system that increases speed and reliability.

IKEv2, a safe and contemporary option on Windows and i. OS, can be found. Open. Open. VPN is the preferred open-source protocol. It can only be used on routers. Notably, Hotspot Shield took the title of fastest VPN in 2020, and while it didn’t manage a repeat performance in 2021 (see below) it held its own against other services equipped with Wire. Guard

Annoying ads

Possible privacy concerns

U.S.-based

NEW: More virtual country sites added. This review originally appeared June 20, 2018,

Hotspot Shield is able to offer 500MB free data each day, more than Windscribe. Also, its network performance and speed are better than many other VPNs. Hotspot Shield’s free service does not offer any ads. It also allows you to connect to only U.S.-based servers.

There are two types of VPNs: free and premium. We do not recommend them as they can take your bandwidth, use your browsing history, or infuse ads. Although Hotspot Shield is free, it does track which websites its users have visited. At least, you will see ads in the Android version. If you don’t pay, there is no incentive for your privacy.

We recommend that you use the “freemium” VPN service tiers as a teaser for paid plans. While most free offers have data limitations or speed restrictions (although you’ll still be able to see how they make money),

Hot. Spot Shield VPN is now available from Anchor. It is available in two versions: the free “Hot.vpn” VPN, which acts as a proxy and has a bandwidth limit. Spot Shield Elite

Hot. Spot Shield Elite VPN encryption, speed and security features are compared to other VPN services.

Their company has been around since 2005, and they have experienced a rapid growth in their customer base.

As with most popular VPN companies however, the number of customers you have doesn’t automatically mean your best product.

It remains to be asked, is Hotspot Shield’s huge user base due a stellar VPN, or stellar marketing? I’m hoping to find out the answer over the course of the review.

Jurisdictions: US AES-128/AES-256 IPv6

The problem: Insufficient audits, excessive logging and close-source protocols

A different VPN is better if your primary concern is not streaming video quickly but privacy and security. Hotspot Shield’s history is unquestionably shady. The protocol it uses is proprietary, as well as its privacy and data collection policies.

Hotspot makes use of its Catapult Hydra proprietary protocol. The protocol is essential to Hotspot’s incredible speed, but it has not been made public for audits, unlike its open-source, Open protocol. VPN. Hotspot provides security experts like Mc. This appeal to authority by Hotspot is not a reason for greater transparency.

Hotspot received a high rating from AV Test in 2018. There’s no way to know what is going on beneath its protocols, so giving more audits by third parties to Hotspot with regularly audited VPNs such as Tunnel would be a good step. Bear As recently as April 2021, review site vpn. Mentor discovered that Hotspot Shield’s Google Chrome plugin had a DNS error. Hotspot made an official statement at the time.

According to the company, “The vulnerabilities that they identified were contained only in the Chrome plug in,” it said. These vulnerabilities did not affect desktop and mobile users of Hotspot Shield. We appreciate and commend vpn. Mentor’s effort to ensure that VPN applications are secure is commendable.

On its website, however, Hotspot maintains that certain DNS leaks are a matter of crossed-purposes between its product and testing sites.

Hotspot Shield Elite will monitor your “nature of requests” to its servers. It may include information like what you are requesting, app information, timestamps, and other relevant information.

If you download the free version of this program, advertisers will have access to your personally identifiable information. It’s best not to use ad-supported online services if you want to keep your privacy private.

Connection timestamps could potentially be used – alongside other data points – to prove that you have visited a certain website. This is unlikely to happen, but we would rather Hotspot Shield didn’t log this information for three years.

SUMMARY Hotspot Shield VPN records your IP address and requests to websites, but only in aggregate. The service has a history that is not favorable in terms of privacy and we cannot recommend it to users who want high anonymity online. You can read the PIA VPN reviews to see if there is a VPN provider that won’t log any web activity.

Hotspot Shield was criticized in the past due to its questionable log practices. I wanted to find out how the new version protects users privacy.

Anchor’s original flagship product Hotspot Shield is Hotspot Shield. Free is a Switzerland-based firm. It was eventually acquired by Aura in the USA, an American-based firm, as Pango.

US users are members of Five Eyes, an alliance that includes five countries. This may cause some dismay to those who want international intelligence collection. However, this issue isn’t a problem if VPN logs are kept.

Adding to concern, Hotspot Shield doesn’t exactly have a rosy past when it comes to privacy. For example, a 2016 report brought to light some of the company’s questionable activities.

In addition, a privacy advocacy group, the Centre for Democracy and Technology, filed a related complaint against Hotspot Shield with the Federal Trade Commission back in August, 2017.

Hotspot Shield seems to be improving its privacy practices slowly but steadily. In an earlier review of Hotspot Shield, I noticed that they still kept user IP addresses logs for the entire session. But, then, deleted them. The company now claims there’s no log of IP addresses. This is a huge plus for privacy.

Hotspot Shield Security Suite Highlights: