ExpressVPN is a popular VPN service provider based in British Virgin Islands, it stands out from all the VPN providers in the world with its unbeatable all-round performance.
User Experience
ExpressVPN is very easy to use, it has dedicated apps that simplify the process of setting up VPN on PC, smartphone and many other platforms, the interface of its app is well designed and intuitive, the home screen of ExpressVPN’s desktop or mobile app is simply a large power button in the upper center and a selected server location below it.
You do not even need to care about the server location, just hit the power button, the app will automatically select one of the best server locations for you based on your device and location, by using its Smart Location feature. You can also select another server location manually by clicking on an icon of three dots to the right of your current server location, a menu of server locations that are sorted by region will show up, then you can choose from servers in more than 90 countries. If you think it’s hard to choose from so many countries, you can tap the “Recommended” tab to view a list of recommended servers.
Other settings like encryption protocol are also automatically selected for you by the app, if you want to adjust these settings, simply tap or click the icon of three lines in the top left corner of the app, which will pull up a menu of items of settings, from there you can easily navigate to the specific options of each item and do your desired customization.
Speed
ExpressVPN is best known for its lightning fast speed, it’s one of the fastest VPNs on the market (It’s hard to say which VPN is the fastest, it depends on the location of test and which server to connect, the one other VPN on the market that can be comparable to ExpressVPN in terms of speed is NordVPN), and one of the fastest VPNs for bypassing censorship in China.
To understand the speed of VPN, you need to know what starting connection speed is, it is basically the speed of your internet connection before your VPN is turned on. As an encryption tool, all VPNs will slow down connections, this is similar with Tor Browser, though the extent is not as much as that of Tor Browser. A fast VPN is one that doesn’t significantly decrease the starting connection speed.
In my test, my starting connection speed was about 10M/s, to help you understand this speed, an example is with this speed a 720P 2-hour movie can be downloaded within 3 to 4 minutes. After ExpressVPN is turned on, my connection speed became 7M/s, the speed only decreased by 30%, it’s the fastest VPN I’ve tested, by contrast, with most other VPNs the connection speed decreased by 50%-70%. A 30% decrease on speed is worth it as you get the advantage that your internet traffic will be encrypted and you can mask your real IP with the one of the VPN server’s, so that no one can track what you are downloading from the internet or track any of your internet activities.
If you are in China, with ExpressVPN you can stream videos on blocked sites like YouTube without any interruptions, because with a connection speed of 7M/s, theoretically a 720P video with a running time of 2 hours can be loaded within about 5 minutes, which is far less than its running time, that’s why you won’t experience interruptions even the video is played in the definition of 1080P. The actual loading time will maybe longer, as sometimes the videos will temporarily stop loading when the loaded part is much longer than the part that has been played, but what can be sure is that users will not experience interruptions when watch YouTube videos with ExpressVPN turned on in China.
Platforms & Devices
ExpressVPN supports practically every device and operating system out there, and its website has detailed installation instructions on each of these devices or systems, tutorials are available in videos and articles with informative images.
Dedicated apps are offered for the devices with following operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and for the following other devices: Chromebook, Kindle Fire, and Router.
For other devices that dedicated apps is not offered, ExpressVPN’s website has detailed step-by-step installation guides to help you set up VPN on them, such devices include gaming consoles, smart TVs, and streaming devices.
ExpressVPN allows a single user account to connect up to 5 devices simultaneously, the feature of simultaneous connection can be helpful when you need more than one device to connect VPN in the same time, or you want to share the VPN with your family members.
Five devices for simultaneous connection is well enough in most cases, but if you do need more than 5 devices to connect to ExpressVPN in the same time, you can set up the VPN on router, it’s easy as ExpressVPN even has dedicated app for router, once it’s set up you will be able to connect any number of devices to VPN simultaneously as long as the devices are connected to your WiFi.
Server Locations
ExpressVPN has more than 3,000 servers around world, the servers are located in 160 cities in 94 countries. These servers generate more than 25,000 different IP addresses for users to disguise their real IP addresses.
Pricing
ExpressVPN is a little pricier compared to other VPN services, but considering its incredible quality the price is actually reasonable and worth it.
The price is based on the length of the subscription plan you choose, the longer you subscribe for, the lower the monthly cost will be, there are three different subscription plans to choose from:
– 12 Months: $6.67/month (49% discount)
– 6 Months: $9.99/month (23% discount)
– 1 Month: $12.95/month
Though the price varies based on different plans, the features offered by ExpressVPN are all the same.
When you subscribed ExpressVPN, you automatically get a 30-day money-back guarantee, this is practically not different from a free trial, as you can get the refund with no questions asked as long as you are in the 30-day period. By contrast, some other VPNs like PureVPN and NordVPN will ask a lot of questions when users request refunds, and many requests are refused.
Customer Support
Apart from the excellent performance of the VPN service, ExpressVPN also offer the industry-leading customer support. There are two types of customer support, one is the responsive and friendly live chat support that is offered 24 hours everyday, which means at any time if you need help when you come across an unexpected issue, you can contact the support team for professional troubleshooting help by the form of online live chat, you will get response from a staff of support team within a few seconds. You can also contact the support team by the form of Email if you prefer, in that way, you will get a response in one to two hours.
Aside from the customer support, you can find a lot of resources for troubleshooting and many step-by-step tutorials for the use of VPN on the website of ExpressVPN, these tutorials are much more comprehensive than those on websites of other VPN providers.
Security
ExpressVPN is not just excellent on speed, it’s also an extremely secure VPN service. While some other VPN providers sacrifice their users’ online security to improve speeds, ExpressVPN is taking its users’ online security quite seriously, it provides many useful security features like DNS leak blocking, IPv6 leak blocking, WebRTC leak blocking, and VPN kill switch. The feature VPN kill switch ensures your online activities to stay protected when your device encounter an interruption on connection.
ExpressVPN also offers an advanced feature called split tunneling, with this feature you can select some websites to not be encrypted by VPN as you are visiting them using normal internet connection, while browsing the remaining websites with the encryption of VPN. This feature is very helpful as some websites do not collect sensitive information hence are not necessary to be visited with a VPN, and some websites are not blocked by the countries with censorship and can be visited without a VPN.
ExpressVPN uses a variety of security protocols to keep its users’ browsing data anonymous and secure, the protocols include IKEv2/IPSec, L2TP/IPSec, OpenVPN (UDP and TCP), PPTP, and SSTP, if you are not familiar with these terms, don’t worry, by default ExpressVPN can determine and select a best security protocol for you.
ExpressVPN encrypts users’ connection with AES 256-bit encryption, which is nearly uncrackable.
While with these security features your online activities is pretty safe, your private data is well protected from the prying eyes of third parties, however, is the operator of the VPN service trustworthy, will they store your logs and access your data, or hand it over to authorities in some investigations?
As a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, ExpressVPN is outside the jurisdiction of the 14-eyes surveillance alliance, so foreign governments can not make demands for user information from the company of ExpressVPN unless in the events serious crimes occurred, but even in such cases the users of ExpressVPN are still safe, because ExpressVPN has a strict no-logs policy.
With the no-logs policy ExpressVPN does not and will never collect any private usage data from any individual user, the only data it collects is some anonymous data that is used for helping troubleshoot technical issues and improving their service.
The no-logs policy of ExpressVPN is revealed to be true in December 2017 when Turkish authorities seized an ExpressVPN server, which was thought to have been used by the assassin who killed a Russian ambassador to Turkey, the investigators could not find any user connection logs due to the fact that no data logs was retained on the server. Not all VPN providers really commit the no-log policy even they have such policies, ExpressVPN is the only one provider that was proved to not collecting private user data, some other VPN providers, like PureVPN and HideMyAss have been caught retaining sensitive user data and even handing over the data to investigators.
Streaming & Torrenting
Streaming:
Streaming is one of the main reasons for people to use a VPN, most streaming sites like Netflix have strict Geo-restrictions, the US version of Netflix is only allowed to be watched by audience in the US, for the people in the rest of the world, they need a VPN to watch it. However, not every VPN can successfully unblock the restriction, many VPNs can be detected by these streaming sites and a VPN-block error message will show up.
ExpressVPN is one of a few VPNs that can efficiently bypass the Geo-restriction of these streaming sites, you can connect to almost any of US-based servers to watch US version of Netflix, or other streaming sites like Hulu, HBO, Amazon Video, etc, or connect to any servers based on other countries to watch other versions of Netflix and other streaming sites. Other VPN providers, like NordVPN and Cyberghost VPN, require their users to use the dedicated servers for streaming.
In addition, the streaming experience with ExpressVPN is very excellent thanks to its super fast and stable connection speed, combined to its great unblocking abilities, ExpressVPN is no doubt the best choice to stream your favorite shows.
Torrenting:
Torrenting is allowed on all servers of ExpressVPN, while many other top VPN providers like NordVPN only allow their users connect to a limited number of servers to torrent, this means not only you can torrent more conveniently, you will also get a faster speed since there will be less congestion compared to a service with a limited number of torrenting servers.
And with the security features and the no-logs policy of ExpressVPN mentioned earlier, we can be sure that you will be very safe to torrent with ExpressVPN.
Bypassing Censorship
ExpressVPN works well in all the countries that have internet censorship, including China, which has a sophisticated internet filtering system (Great Firewall) that can defeat many top VPNs’ attempts of circumvention. Most VPNs can’t bypass the censorship of China because the filtering system is able to detect VPN traffic and block it, ExpressVPN has a proprietary obfuscation technology that can disguise its VPN traffic to not be detected by it, the technology is integrated into all the ExpressVPN servers, so you can connect to any server to access the blocked websites in China, or other countries with repressive internet controls.
With ExpressVPN you can access all the websites or web apps that are blocked by the Great Firewall. Not only so, it’s currently the fastest VPN for bypassing the censorship of China, so if you are in China and want to watch videos on one of the blocked sites, a fast connection speed is required otherwise interruptions will be frequent, ExpressVPN is the best choice to unblock these sites.