IdealVPN is a French-based VPN provider that has been offering (well, has tried to offer) its privacy services since 2010. Sadly, we aren’t even sure if it’s still even active since we couldn’t get its VPN service to run nor did we manage to establish any contact with customer support.
Price
As usual in this industry, IdealVPN gives you several subscription options to choose from, with pricing expressed in euros. There’s the monthly one at €4.90/month ($5.80), 6-month at €24.90 ($29.40) every six months (equal to $4.90/month), and 1-year at €49.90/year ($58.90/year, equal to $4.90/month).
The 6-month plan includes a 3-day free trial, the only trick is that you have to leave your payment details and remember to cancel the account unless you want to pay for its entire duration. Fair enough.
There’s no mention of a refund or money-back guarantee “except in special cases a appreciation [sic] of IdealVPN, especially in the case of inability of the user to establish a first connection.” Considering our experience with its non-working service, you may have a strong case there.
Funnily enough, IdealVPN prohibits simultaneous connections using the same account (as per its Terms and Conditions), “unless they are provided to you by a formal offer”. Since the number of allowed simultaneous connections isn’t mentioned in the description of any of the offers, we were left baffled by what actually did the provider mean by this.
Alternatives
IdealVPN isn’t worth your time. Instead, you should give chance to some of the best VPN platforms on the market, headed by the celebrated ExpressVPN, followed by its very capable contenders like NordVPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, and many others.
All of them can provide more than simple VPN accessibility (which is the bare minimum we couldn’t even get with IdealVPN) and you’d be getting your money’s worth in terms of service quality, server quantity, polite and speedy customer service, as well as numerous features, options, and capabilities.
Streaming
Many VPN providers can get you access to your favorite streaming content on various platforms like Netflix, BBC iPlayer, or Hulu that might not be available in all regions. Whether IdealVPN might be one of them is impossible to know, as there’s no information available on the matter and the provider wouldn’t even connect for us, to begin with.
About the company
IdealVPN is a French-based VPN provider, and that’s about as much as you can learn from its website about the company itself. Its servers are located in Germany, the Netherlands, and France but we have no idea how many there are and we’re still waiting for a response to our email asking about this.
The website seems to be available in over 40 different languages, including Arabic, Vietnamese, Bosnian, Catalonian, Japanese, and many others, but we have come to realize that these are more of Google Translate-esque interpretations that are teeming with mistakes and nonsensical sentences.
Privacy and encryption
Not much information about privacy and security is offered on the website, but what we do know is that the platform uses the VPN PPTP protocol with which you can create the connection on your own device. It also deploys the 128-bit encryption that is somewhat weaker than the typically used 256-bit algorithm.
Torrenting is supported, except on the French servers. If you can get it to work, that is - as we couldn’t.
IdealVPN says it monitors the time, date, and duration of your VPN connection, as well as bandwidth used. It claims it uses this data to enforce its terms and conditions and “to generate statistics and optimize the quality and reliability of service.” Without much success, if we may add.
Support
There are no native clients, but the provider claims its service can be enabled on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. However, we couldn’t find instructions for installing it on Android and iOS anywhere on the website.
There’s also a beta version of the vpnGuardian app, that is supposed to be an assisting VPN client or something, but we’re not sure.
Other than the installation manuals for the few supported platforms and a decent enough blog (although only in French), there isn’t much information on the website, and an actual knowledge base seems to be too much to ask for.
The provider claims to have a 24/7 support team you can reach via email or contact form but we so far had no luck in getting a response to our queries.
Speed and experience
Although it claims its lack of native clients makes it easy to set up, this is hardly the case. Instead of having a simple app that you just download, install, and you’re good to go, not having such an option means you have to carefully follow the instructions on the website and hope you’ve done everything right and that the instructions weren’t wrong.
The only easy thing was installing the vpnGuardian app but we’re still struggling to see the point of it as it wasn’t even working.
Since neither the vpnGuardian app nor the PPTP connection via the device wouldn’t work, no matter how many times we tried, our attempts at testing the download speeds were futile. Similar complaints could be found on the provider’s Facebook page.
Verdict
IdealVPN is a laughably poor VPN service, one that is very far away from major platforms such as ExpressVPN for many reasons but mainly for not being able to connect at all. This is followed by a total lack of communication from the customer support’s side, absence of important information and native apps, and many other issues. Due to the awful experience in trying to test it, we aren’t even sure why this provider still has half-decent reviews online.
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