Antivirus software protects you from malware, but to protect your privacy and security on the web, you need a virtual private network, or VPN.
Ivacy offers VPN protection at an affordable price and boasts servers in far-flung corners of the world.
It's a strong offering on paper, but we had some hiccups in testing.
At the end of the day, it can't match our Editors' Choice winners NordVPN, Private Internet Access, and TunnelBear VPN in terms of robustness or ease of use.
What Is a VPN?
When you point your browser at a website, it sends a request to the server that hosts the website and returns with the content you want.
It's a bit different when you use a VPN.
When a VPN is active, it creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a server controlled by the VPN provider.
From there, your request exits onto the worldwide internet as normal, returning via the VPN server and through the encrypted tunnel.
The practical upshot is that no one can intercept your web traffic as it moves from your computer to the VPN server.
And if you're connecting to websites via HTTPS (which you should), your data remains encrypted for its entire journey, even after it leaves the VPN server.
This is why you need a VPN.
VPNs are particularly important when you're using public Wi-Fi or unfamiliar networks.
In these situations, hackers may be lurking on the network or even running the network themselves, hoping to snag your personal information.
Those aren't the only threats to your data.
Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to let ISPs sell anonymized user data.
A VPN prevents your ISP from snooping on your online activity in an attempt to monetize you.
Because your traffic, and the traffic of others, appears to come from the VPN server, it's much harder (but not impossible) to correlate online activities to your computer.
That's great if you're concerned about advertisers or law enforcement trying to track your activities online.
VPNs also hide your location information by obscuring your IP address; these are distributed geographically and can be unsettlingly close to where you actually live.
If someone were to try and find your IP address while you're connected to the VPN, they'd only see the IP address of the VPN server, which can be in another city, state, or country.
Journalists and activists operating in regimes that censor the internet have used VPNs for years to securely tunnel past those web controls and access the open internet.
By the same token, you can connect to a distant VPN server and make it appear as if your traffic is coming from a different country.
That's handy, especially if you want to stream video from a different country.
Pricing and Features
An account with Ivacy VPN costs $8.95 per month, making it one of the most affordable VPNs I've yet reviewed.
The average cost of a month-to-month VPN service is currently at around $10.50, well above what Ivacy charges.
Ivacy is still pricier than Private Internet Access, however, as that Editors' Choice-winning service runs a mere $6.95 per month.
As with other VPN services, if you select a longer-term subscription, the cost per month is significantly reduced.
A one-year plan with Ivacy costs $36.00, and a two-year plan costs $48.00.
As with most VPN services, Ivacy does not require you to purchase more expensive plans to get access to everything the company has to offer.
ProtonVPN is a noteable exception to this trend, offering a low-cost Basic plan with just a few servers, and a more expensive Plus plan that adds more servers and features.
Some VPN services offer even longer subscription periods.
KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, for example, lives up to its name with an effectively life-long plan.
It also offers billing periods as short as one week, which is great for travelers who want a VPN only for a vacation or business trip.
At Daxdi, however, we recommend using a VPN as often as possible.
If cost is a major hurdle, fear not.
There are many excellent free VPNs on the market.
Our Editors' Choice winner, TunnelBear, offers a free version with a limited amount of data available.
ProtonVPN, on the other hand, limits the number of simultaneous devices and available servers to its free customers.
Ivacy does not, however, offer a free version.
An Ivacy account lets you connect from up to five devices simultaneously.
That's the industry average, although NordVPN provides up to six connections and CyberGhost up to seven.
TorGuard, on the other hand, has a simple slider where you simply pick how many simultaneous connections you want, and are charged accordingly.
Notably, Ivacy includes a split-tunneling feature.
This lets you decide which apps should send their traffic through Ivacy's encrypted tunnel and which should not.
That's particularly handy for gaming with a VPN, since you can avoid the detrimental speed and latency effects of a VPN on your game while remaining otherwise protected.
In the past, it was tricky to set up a VPN and hard to use one, too.
Thankfully, that's not an issue anymore, as most companies now provide first-party client apps on a variety of platforms.
Ivacy offers apps for Android, the Chrome browser, the Firefox browser, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
This last client is the focus of this review.
VPN for Kodi and Streaming Boxes
On its website Ivacy makes a big deal about supporting the Kodi media server.
I haven't used this particular aspect of the software, but I know from SEO research that many of you are Googling to figure out which VPN to use with Kodi.
While Kodi is a very popular method to watch your favorite shows and movies, it's even harder to extend VPN protection to streaming boxes like the AppleTV or Roku.
Thankfully, some companies like TorGuard make their software available preinstalled on some streaming boxes.
Several VPNs I have reviewed can even be installed on your router, in order to provide protection to all your connected devices.
VPN Protocols
There's more than one flavor of VPN protocol.
In fact there's an entire rainbow of protocols designed to protect your data.
In general, I prefer OpenVPN.
This protocol is newer, known for its speed, and is open-source.
This last point is important, because it means many eyes have scoured its code for potential vulnerabilities.
The Windows app supports OpenVPN in TCP and UDP flavors, as well as the older L2TP, and the newer IKEv2.
It irks me a bit that the app doesn't clearly label it as OpenVPN TCP and UDP, but that's a minor issue.
Ivacy has modern, excellent technology under the hood.
Servers and Server Locations
When comparing VPN companies, it's useful to look at how many servers the company offers and where those servers are located.
In general, the closer the server is to you, the better performance you'll experience.
So having a lot of servers in lots of different places means that you're more likely to have a better experience, no matter where you might roam.
Ivacy offers only 459 servers, a bit below the 500-server minimum threshold I have come to expect.
In fact, so many VPN services are now exceeding 700 and even 1,000 servers that I may need to raise the cutoff soon.
NordVPN currently leads the pack with over 3,400 servers, and Private Internet Access is close behind with 3,275.
TorGuard recently expanded its offering to 3,000 servers, placing it among the three most robust services I have yet reviewed.
While Ivacy lacks sheer numbers, the servers it has are well distributed.
The company offers 100 server locations, oustripping the 59 countries offered by NordVPN and the 22 from TunnelBear.
PureVPN, notably, offers 180 locations across 140 countries, but it's Hide My Ass's unbeaten 286 locations in 220 countries that leads this category.
Ivacy also has some very strategically positioned servers.
While most VPN companies ignore the entire continent of Africa, Ivacy has six locations.
South and Central America is another region passed over by many VPN companies, but not Ivacy.
It also provides servers in regions with repressive internet censorship, including China, Russia, and Turkey.
The number of servers, however, can be a bit deceiving.
Some VPN companies make extensive use of virtual server locations.
These are physical servers configured to behave as if they are actually several servers in different locations.
This is an issue for anyone concerned about the precise path of their data.
You might be miffed to discover that by selecting a server in the data haven of Iceland, that it was actually being routed through a virtual server in Shanghai.
For its part, Ivacy uses only 26 virtual servers.
Hide My Ass, on the other hand, is able to support its incredible number of server locations because only 61 of its servers are physical.
The rest, numbering almost 300 servers, are virtual.
NordVPN has no virtual servers, while Private Internet Access and TunnelBear use virtual servers to accommodate users rather than support faux-locations.
Your Privacy With Ivacy
The main reason to use a VPN is to protect your data from being spied upon by ISPs, hackers, and three-letter government agencies.
So it wouldn't make sense to use a service that would spy on you, too.
In order to evaluate what efforts VPN companies take to protect your privacy, I read through their entire privacy policy and discuss issues with company representatives.
Ivacy's privacy is longer and less clear than I like, but entirely readable.
It might sound a bit odd, but I actually have preferences when it comes to privacy policies.
TunnelBear's, for example, is very easy to read and includes pop-outs to explain the company's thinking and complex issues.
TorGuard has, perhaps, the shortest and most glib of privacy policies.
In its policy, Ivacy says that it does not "log or monitor, online browsing activities, connection logs, VPN IPs assigned, original IP addresses, browsing history, outgoing traffic, connection times, data you have accessed and/or DNS queries generated by your end.
We have no information that could associate specific activities to specific users." That's exactly what you want to hear from a VPN company.
It goes on to say "Ivacy does not, under any circumstances, share, sell or rent users' personal information provided during the registration process." This is also excellent, since a VPN company should ideally be making its money without monetizing its users.
The company also does not inject ads into customer's traffic.
The policy goes on to itemize the only information that Ivacy does collect and why it needs this information.
For the most part, the company only retains the email address, name, and payment method in order to carry out billing and other site functions.
Notably, the policy says that data regarding "inactive customers" is removed every 12 months.
It's also important to know where your VPN company is located, since this dictates the legal jurisdiction under which it operates.
Because of their location, some companies may be required to hold on to certain data for set periods of time, or need to cooperate with different law enforcement bodies.
Ivacy is located in Singapore and operates under that legal jurisdiction.
Personally, I do not believe that I can judge the quality of any company based solely on its location, but it is still an important consideration.
I encourage everyone to make their own decisions in this regard, and use the service they feel comfortable with.
As with the best VPN services, Ivacy tells me that it strives to retain as little usable information as possible in order to protect customers even when presented with a legal subpoena.
A representative told me, "Our servers, processes and systems do not keep any personal and sensitive information.
By design, Ivacy VPN has no sensitive data to share, even when legally bound to do so."
Hands On With Ivacy
I had no trouble installing the Windows client on a Lenovo ThinkPad T460s laptop running the latest version of Windows 10.
I did, however, have some trouble signing up for Ivacy.
For some reason, the site wasn't returning an error message when I accidentally used the incorrect payment information.
Note that Ivacy accepts all major credit cards, as well as Alipay, Bitty, PayPal, and sundry cryptocurrencies.
This last option is important if you want to pay for your VPN anonymously.
I'm not a fan of Ivacy's design.
It's slick, and blends in pretty well with Windows 10, but my first thought was that it looked fussy.
There's just a lot happening in this little app, and I could easily see someone being overwhelmed by it.
I much prefer the simplicity of NordVPN and the cuteness of TunnelBear.
Fussiness aside, Ivacy echoes the scenario-based setup of PureVPN and Hide My Ass.
The right rail has presets for Secure Download, Streaming, Unblocking, and Dedicated IP.
You can pick the one that meets your needs in the moment, or use the Fast Connect button from the main page.
Most scenario-centered VPN services, including PureVPN, eschew the Fast Connect option, to their detriment.
The Streaming option is one I've seen in other products, including CyberGhost and PureVPN.
In Ivacy, the streaming option serves as quick links to servers for watching the BBC iPlayer and watching streaming TV in the US.
There's an option to request new "channels," but I prefer CyberGhost's setup that allows you to simply create your own presets for different sites and services.
The Dedicated IP option requires an add-on purchase (discussed below).
The Unblocking option defaults to a nearby country that doesn't have restricted content.
If you're looking to access websites blocked by your local government, this is the option for you.
I'm not clear on Secure Download options, however.
When I selected it, Ivacy connected me to a VPN server in Belgium.
To my mind, the Belgians are known for their excellent beer and not so much their prestige in downloading.
This wasn't the only odd connection I had in my testing of Ivacy.
Using the fast connect button, the app automatically selected a German VPN server for me.
I prefer VPN apps that locate the closest available server.
Someone who had never used a VPN before might be quite confused by Ivacy's choice in my case.
Thankfully, a search box lets you peruse Ivacy's server offerings by country or even by city.
Unfortunately, I found that Ivacy didn't always work as advertised.
Part of my testing involves connecting to a VPN server in Australia.
For whatever reason, Ivacy couldn't successfully connect with any of...
