Ivacy VPN (2022) Review + Guide

Are you looking for a new Ivacy VPN review? That’s logical, the last couple of years these services have gained enormous popularity, almost 30% of the internet users has been using VPN services over the past 5 years. We at Globalwatchonline.com tested and tried all different providers for you, read our comprehensive IvacyVPN review and learn everything about this service, we are sure that once you’re done reading you will know if this provider suits you.

Who and what is IvacyVPN

Over the course of this review, I will be going over everything, including their (Ivacy) pricing, features, speed, cons, and pros. Headquartered in the weird and wonderful island-nation of Singapore, Ivacy VPN has been protecting their customer’s online experiences since early 2007. Despite their impressive decade-plus tenure in the VPN marketplace, Ivacy is still a relatively unknown brand.

• Operated under the umbrella of PMG Private Limited, Ivacy is an understandably secretive company, and this surprises me. In fact, in 2010, it was Ivacy’s technology team that was responsible for unveiling the revolutionary concept of split tunneling, a technology which allows users to decide what traffic is sent through an ISP and what traffic is protected by their VPN.

So with all of this in mind, I decided to review Ivacy for myself to see whether or not this relatively unknown VPN could be one of the best VPN services. For this review, we put IPVanish through its paces. We thoroughly tested its speed, performance, ease of use, and ability to access popular streaming services like Netflix. The short answer? Yes, IPVanish is able to unblock Netflix. It can also unblock popular services like Vudu, HBO Go, and YouTube and can be used as a VPN for Kodi.

What are the advantages and pro’s?

• Works on all major platforms
• Allows torrenting on dedicated servers
• Unblocks Netflix, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer
• Kill-switch and split tunneling
• 3,500 servers in 100 locations
• Servers optimized for Kodi

Good Speeds for IvacyVPN

In order to ensure the accuracy of this review, I conducted a couple of simple speed tests at speedtest.net to determine just how quick Ivacy really is. Here are the results of the IvacyVPN Download and Upload speed test

US Server (New York)

• Ping: 115ms
• Download: 45.86mbps
• Upload: 43.92mbps

EU Server (Amsterdam)

• Ping: 42ms
• Download: 53.04mbps
• Upload: 25.39mbps

Asia Server (Hong Kong)

• Ping: 261ms
• Download: Test Failed
• Upload: Test Failed

UK Server (London)

• Ping: 50ms
• Download: 53.24mbps
• Upload: 33.36mbps

As always take these speed tests with a grain of salt since they rely on so many different variables and can change from person to person. However, we have tested over 70+ VPNs for this site so we have a baseline that we can compare every VPN against. All in all, Ivacy’s speeds are solidly middle of the road.

Although I was disappointed to find that their Asia servers were completely unusable, at 53.0 Mbps for an EU server, Ivacy’s speeds are up to par with competitors like TorGuard and Buffered. If you are a seasoned VPN user, Ivacy’s speeds are nothing to get excited about, and if you are in need of a faster VPN, you should check out our reviews of Surfshark review and ExpressVPN review.

A True No Logging Policy

One of my biggest pet peeves when reviewing any VPN provider is a falsely advertised “Zero Logging” policy, and unfortunately, this trend seems to become more and more pervasive by the day. In fact, this issue has become so pronounced within the VPN industry, that I no longer trust any VPN provider’s claims of “Keeping no logs” until I have read every word in their privacy policy.

• While I was reviewing Ivacy’s VPN, I did indeed scour through the fine print in great detail and quite frankly. I was shocked. Ivacy actually upholds it’s advertised zero-logging policy, and they do it better than just about any other VPN that I have reviewed. That’s it. No traffic logs, no bandwidth logs, and no duration logs. Just pure, unadulterated privacy.

Good Customer Service

I’ll be the first person to admit it. I did not have high hopes about Ivacy’s customer service. Forgive my cynicism, but after reviewing more than 70 VPNs, I’ve learned to have exceptionally low expectations when reviewing the customer service offered by a cheap VPN service.

After all, companies have a limited number of resources. If they offer high-quality services at a budget-friendly price (as Ivacy does) it’s typically safe to assume that they had to cut back on another area of their business in order to do so. And the customer support team is typically the first casualty…

• However, with Ivacy, I was pleasantly surprised to find that their customer service agents were quick to respond and extremely helpful. Although I would like to see more detailed and thorough responses from their agents, I’m hard-pressed to complain considering the rapid response times and efficient support that I received.
• I submitted several other queries designed to gauge the knowledge and efficacy of the team (all of them were submitted at similar times) and all of these queries were answered in a similarly timely (and brief) manner.

To ensure that my experience was an accurate representation of their customer support team, I also reviewed their social media accounts to see how well they handled other customer complaints and questions. Again, I was impressed to find that their team was extremely effective and knowledgeable and nearly every issue that arose was the fault of a customer and not Ivacy.

Available Protocols: OpenVPN, SSTP, PPTP, L2TP and IKev2

Someone turns their computer into a network access point, and gives is a real-enough sounding name (often imitating popular, well-known ones like “T-Mobile” for instance). When you connect, you’re actually connecting through their computer. And they now will gain access to all of the information you used to log in, as well as your browsing activity.

• That means when you pull out a credit card or run a few quick transactions, all of that data gets logged because the connection is unencrypted. Unfortunately, this example of ‘WiFi’ eavesdropping is one of the most common (and oldest) tricks in the ‘man-in-the-middle’ attack playbook.

Now compare that to a normal web session on a legitimate network. You pull up a bank’s website and all of the activities during your entire session will be encrypted by an SSL certificate. These create special keys on each access point so that no one else can monitor or gain access to what’s happening after you get on the site.

• The same underlying SSL technology is used to power OpenVPN, which is the go-to protocol for all major (and legitimate) VPN providers. Ivacy is no different, defaulting to OpenVPN whenever possible. If you’re unable to use OpenVPN for some reason (like device restrictions), Ivacy also has other common protocol options available, including PPTP, SSTP, L2TP, and IKEv2.
• Some of these other protocols, like IPv6 for example, have known security vulnerabilities. In this case, though, Ivacy attempts to fix this issue by sending that data and traffic through a VPN anyway.

256-Bit Encryption

Public WiFi networks are some of the most common places that people can gain access to your online activities. Even hotel and airport WiFi’s, which you would think were rock-solid, are often susceptible to attacks. (In some cases, these institutions are the worst offenders – tracking every single action you make on their networks and often selling your information to third parties.) Many public networks though are susceptible to bad behavior. Hackers can run automated systems on these networks to monitor and attempt to ‘brute-force’ their way into your accounts.

1. Brute force attacks will target a specific website’s login page and attempt to crack the username and password combinations by running through endless variations until they eventually land on the right one. They test one letter or number at a time and continue cycling through, adding more digits until they eventually figure out how to gain access.
2. These attacks are the culprits in some of the most common you hear about every single day on the news. For example, brute force attacks are one of the leading ways people gain access to WordPress websites (which is the single biggest platform on the internet).
3. They’re also the method that’s commonly used to hack into celebrity iCloud accounts and leak private, photos and videos. Brute force attacks work well when encryption is weak.
4. In other words, when there are only so many possible combinations of letters and numbers, it’s only a matter of time it takes to break. Generally speaking, the weaker the encryption, the faster it can be cracked.

All encryptions can eventually be cracked. But if they’re strong enough, it might take decades (or centuries) to do it. That’s why 256-bit encryption is considered the strongest possible available on the market today. It’s so strong, that it’s used by government agencies and the cream of the crop security companies.Ivacy prides itself on their use of 256-bit encryption, which means your connection through them should be nearly impossible to hack.

Ivacy Cons

Singapore Has Been Confirmed as a “Five Eyes” Partner. The term “Five Eyes” is not something that is commonly understood or discussed in the general public… And with good reason. When Edward Snowden executed his now-notorious security breach, he published more than 1.5 million classified NSA documents.

• Among the information included in this leak was a document revealing the details of a security operation known as “The Five Eyes”, an information and resource sharing partnership between the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that allows each government to locate and spy on “anyone, anywhere, anytime.”
• In other words, the Five Eyes partnership is a privacy advocate’s worst nightmare. By tapping fiber optics cables at more than 20 locations worldwide, the governments in question can access personal data and the real-time location of just about any person they so choose.

Unfortunately for Ivacy, other leaked documents have shown that South Korea and Singapore (the location of their headquarters) are partners in the “Five Eyes Agreement” and regularly provide these other governments with access to sensitive information and resources. While this shouldn’t have any direct effect on Ivacy’s security since they keep 0 logs, you should still be cognizant of the political landscape surrounding the company’s headquarters.

No TOR or Proxy Compatibility

While this is a minor annoyance for most VPN users, I was disappointed to see that Ivacy is not compatible with the TOR network or any other third party proxies. Although this will not affect the VPN experience for most users, the added layers of security provided by TOR and other proxies can quite literally save your life in some of the more Draconian countries. For example, TOR compatibility is included in NordVPN (here’s a review).

30-Day Money Back Guarantee

One of the only problems that I had with Ivacy’s pricing package is that they are not up-front about the stipulations for their 30-day money-back guarantee. It’s a pretty common practice for a VPN provider to set limitations on how many gigabytes of service you can use before you forfeit your money-back guarantee. However, in most instance, this is very well advertised and the customer understands the limitations of the guarantee.

After doing some digging through their various policies and legal disclaimers, here’s how the money-back guarantee actually works. You claim for a refund within 30 days (or 7 days for a 1-month plan) of your subscription date, one thing is for sure, this is not a Free VPN.

• Your account has not already been suspended by Ivacy for breach of any clause mentioned in the terms of service
• You have not consumed more than 500MB of bandwidth, which includes both upload and download activity using Ivacy; or you have not exceeded 30 sessions i.e. the number of times you connected to Ivacy services, whichever occurs first
• You previously have not claimed a refund under this policy. You have not used BitCoin, BitPay, Coin Payments or Paymentwall as your payment method Personally, I think this is a pretty fair agreement.
• However, I also think that the clauses in their refund policy should be stated much more obviously. I mean really… How often do customers take the time to review the ToS before making a purchase? You, me, and the folks over at Ivacy all know that the answer to that question is a resounding “Never!”

Although I won’t blame Ivacy of intentionally lying to their user base, I will say that the conditions surrounding their money-back guarantee should be spelled out on their sales page, not buried in their legal disclaimers.

Not All Netflix Servers Work Well

Simply put: Ivacy doesn’t work with Netflix. And they have no intentions of reversing that stance anytime soon. To confirm, we tested the following servers. Each one let us down:

• United States
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Netherlands

Ivacy has even confirmed on their site, that “as the situation stands, internet users will have to cope up with Netflix’s ban policy over the VPN.” So it seems like this won’t change anytime soon. Fortunately, we have confirmed a handful of VPNs are still valiantly trying. Check out our top list of Netflix VPNs to the best of the best.

Do We Recommend Ivacy?

At the end of the day, Ivacy is a quality VPN with acceptable speeds, unbeatable prices, and high-quality customer service. They offer an easy to use platform with an abundance of settings and features to play with and while they are far from perfect, the “Pros” in this case, far outweigh the “Cons”.

• The Singapore-based VPN comes with everything you need: good security and encryption, a kill-switch, servers in 100 locations, access to Netflix and BBC iPlayer, and dedicated servers for torrenting and Kodi.
• In addition, Ivacy provides excellent customer service that’s available 24/7.
• The new (lower!) prices give users the options of subscribing for different periods of time, and a 7 and 30-day money-back guarantee (depending on whether you buy the one-month or year plan).