Today’s review will be about one of the better known names in the VPN industry – TorGuard.
Over the past year, TorGuard has worked hard to re-invigorate its feature offering and image so as attract more users to their anonymous VPN service.
TorGuard was already a solid VPN provider especially as far as protecting users’ online profiles is concerned. Previously, the company’s services appealed more to P2P file sharers and torrent users, but they’ve refined their VPN offering as well.
The company still permits P2P downloading and maintains a high level of privacy for user data.
Here is a full review.
Pricing
TorGuard’s pricing structure comprises three plans: a BitTorrent proxy, a regular VPN plan, and a Torrent VPN plan offered at $5.95, $9.95, and $4.99 per month respectively. They also offer a separate anonymous email account at $6.95 per month.
The anonymous BitTorrent Proxy plan is aimed at BitTorrent users that need high levels of anonymity and privacy while downloading files. The anonymous VPN plan offers the regular VPN features to secure your data and provide a level of privacy. The torrent VPN plan also offers more or less the same VPN features as the anonymous VPN plan.Servers
As always,TorGuard doesn’t directly reveal the precise number of servers they have, but their overage areas are mostly the Far East, Europe, and North America. They state that users can access more than 20 different IP addresses in a country.
In addition, the company has stealth servers that use advanced technology to covert user traffic into ‘normal’ HTTP so as to bypass firewall filters for countries such as Pakistan and China.
The company’s Hong Kong based servers are all configured as stealth servers due to the high rate of Internet censorship in the region. Connecting to TorGuard’s servers will unblock censored content on any website.Security and Privacy
TorGuard supports OpenVPN, PPTP, and L2TP protocols wit 128-bit Blowfish encryption or 256-bit AES. The encryption level you get is automatically selected depending on the server you’re connected to.
Privacy is TorGuard’s strongest feature. The company is well known for its commitment to privacy. Their privacy policy is clear: absolutely no logs are kept. While they keep billing info, they also allow anonymous payments, meaning that users who are concerned that their billing info could compromise their anonymity can opt for anonymous payment services.
The only worry is that the company’s headquarters are in the US and, therefore, they’re liable to the country’s laws. But since they don’t maintain logs (because there is no law mandating it in the US), they will not have anything to reveal to authorities when served with appropriate letters.
Support
TorGuard’s client support is somewhat lacking. The most prominent form of contact is live chat via their website and this is only during US working hours (although they claim it is 24×7 online support). They also offer email support via their site and that’s about it.
In all, TorGuard is a serious VPN provider for users who are serious with online privacy. They are very transparent with their privacy policy and seem transparent too. Their actions echo what is stated in their policy, which is both assuring and refreshing to know of a VPN service. Their prices are not as low as ProXPN or PureVPN but you can still give them a try since they do offer money back guarantee. In case you decide to go for it and purchase their VPN service here is a very informative video how to set it all up in just a few minutes.