Let us start our VPN Unlimited review, a VPN service offered through KeepSolid by noting that it can be used on almost all software platforms to help you protect your online privacy. This includes Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows phone, and Linux. It even has extensions for Chrome and Firefox and guides to use it with other software and devices. The VPN Unlimited service offers multiple pricing plans to accommodate a variety of customer budgets. This even includes a limited time, one-time payment lifetime plan. Their service will give you access to over 300 servers in 50+ locations across the globe. Thus, VPN Unlimited will let you safely surf the Internet from almost anywhere in the world while also helping to protect your online privacy.
Pricing and Special Offers
VPN Unlimited offers six different pricing plans for their basic VPN service. These are as follows:
- Vacation Plan (7 day plan) – $1.99 per 7 days;
- Economy Plan (monthly plan) – $4.99/month;
- Standard Plan (3 month plan) – $3.00/month, billed as $8.99 every 3 months;
- Professional Plan (yearly plan) – $2.08/month, billed as $24.99 a year;
- Premium Plan (3 year plan) – $1.94/month, billed as $69.99 every 3 years;
- Infinity Plan (limited time plan as of November 2016) – $129.99 as a one time payment.
As the above figure demonstrates, VPN Unlimited subscribers receive greater discounts on longer term plans. All plans include the following benefits:
- Unlimited bandwidth – fast unlimited Internet traffic.
- Access to the VPN Unlimited service on multiple devices – you can register up to 5 devices at one time.
- Worldwide access – over 300 servers in 50+ locations.
- Public Wi-Fi protection – privacy and security against hackers at local public Wi-Fi hotspots.
- Bypass censorship – from both government and local firewalls.
- Access geo-restricted content – improve your online viewing experience
- Access to VPN Unlimited from almost any device – the service has software for Windows phone, iPhone, iPod and iPad, as well as, Mac OS X, Windows, and even Linux.
- Money back guarantee – money back for 7 days if you aren’t completely satisfied with their service.
VPN Unlimited Plan Extensions
In addition to their basic service, our VPN Unlimited review showed that they also offer the following plan extensions:
- Personal server – This gives you access to your own personal server in selected worldwide locations which can be used for secure online business transactions or lag-free gaming. Plans include:
- Monthly – $14.99/month;
- Yearly – $12.50/month, billed annually;
- Lifetime – $499.99 0ne-time payment.
- Personal IP address – This lets you have access to a non-shared clean IP address which can provide some of the benefits of a personal server at less expensive price. Plans include:
- Monthly – 9.99/month;
- Yearly – $8.33/month, billed annually.
- Additional devices – This allows you to add more simultaneous devices to your basic plan. Depending on your needs, you can purchase monthly or yearly plans as follows:
- Monthly – One device, $0.99/month; five devices, $4.99/month; or ten devices, $9.99/month.
- Yearly – One device, $0.25/month; five devices, $1.25/month; or ten devices, $2.50/month.
Similarly to the basic VPN plans, greater discounts are offered on the longer term plan extensions.
Additional Product Offerings
In addition to these, our VPN Unlimited review found that their parent company, KeepSolid provides a family of products that includes Wi-Fi Hotspot Protector, Network Tools, Photo Transfer Wi-Fi, Private Browser, and To Do Checklist. Private Browser can be downloaded free and used with VPN Unlimited to help increase your online privacy. To Do Checklist is a task manager that will let you securely share your tasks with others through an encrypted tunnel connection. It can be bundled into a suite with VPN Unlimited using the following plans:
- Professional (yearly plan) – $2.83/month, billed $33.99 every year;
- Premium (3 year plan) – $1.99/month, billed $69.99 once.
We recommend that if you subscribe to their Premium (3 year plan) that you purchase the bundled suite since it is the same price as the VPN Unlimited service so you essentially get the To Do Checklist task manager for free. Links to more information on all of these products can be found on the VPN Unlimited website.
KeepSolid provides various ways to purchase your VPN Unlimited subscription, including Bitcoin, PayPal, Amazon, and credit cards (Visa/MasterCard). Payment using PayPal will make it easy for you to keep all of your online payments in a central location. Paying by Bitcoin will allow you to remain more anonymous.
Risk Free Trial Period
VPN Unlimited offers a 7-day free trial that activates when you sign up for one of their paid plans. This translates into a 7-day money back guarantee. If you are not satisfied with their service and you cancel it within the first seven days of usage, they will give you a full refund of your purchase price. The method used to deliver your refund will depend upon the method you used to make your original purchase. More information on this can be found in their TOS.
VPN Unlimited Network and Server Locations
VPN Unlimited provides access to more that 300 servers in over 50 location. These are spread across more than 40 countries worldwide. They have multiple locations in many key countries like Australia, Canada, India, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A complete list of the regions and countries that VPN Unlimited has servers in follows below:
- North America
- Canada, Mexico, Panama, The United States
- South America
- Brazil, Chile
- Europe
- Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom,
- Asia, Africa, and the Pacific
- Australia, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey
Privacy and Security
Our VPN Unlimited review discovered that they do not log any of the specific web traffic of their users. This means they do no log specific searches or sites visited on their VPN service. They do however keep track of some meta data as is shown in the following excerpt from their privacy page.
KeepSolid Inc. does NOT collect and log any user activities while using any of their VPN services, except the total amount of web traffic for each session and session dates, for displaying them in user’s web cabinet and within the VPN client apps. KeepSolid Inc. also stores the encrypted information about the amount of connected devices for each account, as the maximum permitted amount is limited. This information can be assessed in the User’s Office, where any user can delete their devices from their account.
VPN Unlimited also has a Warrant Canary that they call a Transparency Report where they update their current status. The report updates governmental requests to disclose information requests on a quarterly basis. As of September 1, 2016, no requests of VPN Unlimited users information had occurred.
VPN Unlimited uses the OpenVPN protocol with UDP ports on Android and Windows, and Linux platforms which utilizes the AES-256 algorithm with SHA-1 authentication. The initial handshaking is through RSA-1024. Mac OS X and iOS platforms use IKEv1 with encryption handled by the built-in IPsec using a strong AES-CBC-128 algorithm.
In addition to this, VPN Unlimited offers an additional layer of encryption and data obfuscation for restricted environments. They call this option KeepSolid Wise. It is a protocol extension that helps users to stealthily slip by firewalls. This will keep your VPN connection from being detected and possible ISP throttling. This works by sending VPN traffic through the standard HTTPS TCP 443 port. It is available for iOS 9 or later, Android, Windows, and Linux devices and recommended for customers living in or visiting China, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Syria, or Iran.
VPN Unlimited Support
VPN Unlimited offers 24/7 email ticket support for any problems you may have. Most support tickets are answered in a few hours. Their support form is pretty basic. It allows you to enter your name, email address, description of your issue, and attach any supporting material. They also maintain a FAQ database that you can browse to see if your issue has already been solved. Finally, they have some excellent installation and user manuals for their VPN service for a variety of OS platforms.
Hands-On Testing of VPN Unlimited
The VPN Unlimited service supports iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Windows Phone, and Apple TV. It even has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. We will take a closer look at some of these in this section.
Connecting using the Windows Client
The VPN Unlimited standalone client supports Wndows XP SP3 and above. It can be installed from the VPN Unlimited’s website downloads page. From this page, choose “Windows” and then click on the “Stand Alone” button on the resultant page to download the client installation file to your machine. Run this file as administrator to complete the installation process.
Once the client has been installed on your computer, you will see this window. This is the main VPN client dashboard. The left-hand side menu on this window will allow you to do the following:
- Display a list of severs that you can connect to.
- Look at your account network settings.
- Access social media and support for the VPN Unlimited service.
- Examine your current subscription and renew or change it.
The top of this window has a toggle switch (ON or OFF) to connect or disconnect from the VPN service, shows the current state of the connection and the applicable IP addresses (Real IP and Virtual IP) dependent if you are connected to a VPN server. Selecting “Servers” from the left-hand menu results in the following window.
From the above window, you can choose the VPN server that you want and connect to it using the toggle button. Alternately, you can just double-click on a VPN server location to make the connection. If you select “Optimal”, the client will connect you to the closest/fastest server to your current location. Their is also a setting to connect you to a server to stream your favorite online media content. Also since not all servers can be used for P2P, this window also illustrates those which can by showing the word torrents with a line through it beside those servers which cannot.
Selecting “Account” from the left-hand menu results in the following window which will let you change you account network settings. This window will let you toggle the following settings On or Off:
- KeepSolid Wise – This is the stealth mode which is useful to avoid institutional firewalls like the Great Firewall of China and bypass censorship in many other countries.
- Stop DNS leak – This will direct Internet search queries through the VPN Unlimited internal DNS client.
- Repair connection – This can be used to fix client connection issues.
As these screenshots show, the VPN Unlimited client for Windows is easy to use. Only a couple of clicks are necessary to select network settings, the server location you want, and then connect to the VPN service. Disconnecting is even simpler. Just toggle the connection. You can then choose another server to connect to.
Connecting using the Android App
The VPN Unlimited app is compatible with Android 4.0 and up. It can be installed from the downloads page of their website by selecting “Android”. Clicking on “Download from Google Play” will take you there to download the app. Once it is installed on your Android device, you will need to sign in using your login username and password. Afterwords, you will see the main app connection screen like the one which is shown below. This image depicts the screen in landscape mode with the menu expanded while connected to a VPN server in India-Delhi.
As you can see in this image, the main screen is a map of server locations. Tapping on one of these locations will expand it as shown. Tapping on the switch beside the location in this expanded box will initiate the connection process. Alternately you could also connect using the toggle at the bottom of the screen once you have chosen a VPN server. The top of the screen also shows your location and Virtual IP address.
The expanded menu is accessed by tapping the menu icon (triple horizontal bars) at the top of the screen. It has your account name and the remaining time left on your current subscription. Then there are menus for the following:
- News center – This screen has links to social media accounts and indicates if new messages have been posted.
- Information – Displays a screen containing social follow links and links to various support information.
- Purchases – This screen shows the current VPN plans and let’s you expand your account or subscription duration.
- Settings – This screen which is illustrated below is divided into three sections:
- Account ID – This will allow you to logout of the app but you will have to resign in the next time you open it.
- General – This section will let you examine VPN statistics, log and debug connections, set up a proxy, choose how the app handles reconnects, and redeem codes.
- Security – This section will allow you to set the app so a password is always required to start the app, change your account password, and set the app to use stealth mode.
Buttons to purchase other account options and logout conclude the expanded menu.
You can see that the VPN Unlimited Android app is as easy to use as its Windows client. The main difference is that the main connection screen is map bases instead of a server list. A few taps on the map and you can connect to any VPN server in their network. It also has a few more user settings including stealth mode connections.
VPN Unlimited Speed Test
Our speed test for the VPN Unlimited network showed showed that the performance was good. It was a little above the average of those we have tested in terms of speed difference. As is expected, there is some loss in speed due to the encryption overhead absorbed by using the VPN service. This loss was well within acceptable values for the VPN Unlimited service.
You can see from the images above, the encrypted connection lowered our base ISP download speed from 29.15 Mb/s to 25.98 Mb/s. This is a drop of about 10.8% to a server in Manassas, VA. This is an acceptable loss for the data security offered by encrypting all of your Internet traffic through the VPN Unlimited service.
Conclusions
VPN Unlimited is a service provided by KeepSolid Inc. It will allow you to remain more secure both at home and at your local hotspot by encrypting all of your Internet traffic and tunneling it to dedicated VPN servers. This will make it appear as if the traffic originated elsewhere. Thus helping to protect your online privacy. Their network consists of over 300 servers in more than 50 locations.
VPN Unlimited is based in the United States. It does not log specific sites or queries from their customers but it does store some meta information for account maintenance. VPN Unlimited has custom software for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows phone, and Linux. These also have app extensions for Firefox and Chrome browsers. Their software has a minimum number of settings and is easy to use. A few simple clicks of the mouse or taps on your device screen will have you connect to a VPN server on their network.
All of their apps provide good encryption. Their Windows, Linux, and Android software use the OpenVPN protocol AES-256 with SHA-1 authentication. This gives them a good balance of speed, security, and overall reliability. They have a stealth mode for those who need to bypass firewalls and overcome institutional censorship. Their Mac OS X and iOS apps use IKEv1 and the built-in IPsec for encryption. They utilize a AES-CBC-128 algorithm.
VPN Unlimited also provides manual tutorials to connect to their service on a variety of platforms and operating systems. Their support begins with an online chat service. They have a FAQ database. More involved issues can be handled by their 24/7/365 email ticketing system.
What we liked most about the service:
- Their network is globally diverse.
- They provide clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
- They have mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows phone.
- Dedicated IP addresses and servers for those who need them.
- VPN Unlimited releases a transparency report quarterly.
Ideas to improve the service:
- Increase the encryption strength of their Mac OS X and iOS apps.
- Shorten their customer support times.
- Add a kill switch to their custom software.
VPN Unlimited has network servers on most major continents. They have servers in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, and South America. Members have access to a fast VPN network. They have a 7-day money back guarantee so you can test their service for yourself. Give them a try and see what you think. If you like the speed and peace of mind offered by their VPN service, you can sign up for unlimited access from just $4.99 per month.
