A virtual private network, or VPN, is a simple but powerful tool to protect your data and take back a modicum of online privacy.
TigerVPN is one such service.
While it's pricey for what the company offers, remarkably strong speed test scores and a unique software bundle make it worth a look.
What Is a VPN?
When you activate a VPN, it creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server controlled by the VPN company.
Your web traffic is routed through this tunnel, to the server, and then out into the open internet.
Nobody, not even someone on the same network as you, can see what you're up to.
Even if a bad guy created a bogus Wi-Fi network and tricked your device into connecting to it, your VPN would tunnel your data past him.
A VPN even prevents your ISP from monitoring your online activities, which is great, because Congress has given ISPs the green light to sell anonymized user data to the highest bidder.
These are the most pressing reasons you need a VPN.
Out on the web, a VPN makes it harder to correlate you with your web traffic.
For one thing, all your traffic is mixed up with anyone else who is on the same VPN server.
For another, any observer would see that your traffic is coming from the VPN server, not your actual computer.
This also means that your IP address is effectively hidden, along with your true geographic location.
Political activists and journalists operating in countries with repressive internet policies use VPNs to access the uncensored internet.
Similarly, you can access online streaming video and music that's not available in your country by tunneling your traffic to a VPN server in a different country.
Note, however, that some companies and countries don't take kindly to the use of VPNs and may attempt to block your connections.
It's up to you to research what usage terms or local laws you might be violating by using a VPN for these reasons.
Pricing and Features
TigerVPN is fairly expensive, at $11.99 per month.
That's slightly above the average monthly cost for our top-rated VPNs, which currently stands at $10.28.
This pricing tier gets you access to all of TigerVPN's server locations and unlimited data, but you're restricted to just two simultaneous connections.
Most VPN companies offer five connections for their base fee.
NordVPN and CyberGhost offer six and seven connections, respectively.
Like most VPNs, TigerVPN has longer-term subscriptions that come at a higher initial price, but cost less in total than paying a monthly subscription for the same length of time.
The annual plan costs $79.99 and raises the number of simultaneous connections to an industry average of five.
The highest tier is a three-year subscription period, which costs $99.00.
This tier doesn't add any new features, but is cheaper than the other two in the long run.
TigerVPN doesn't offer a free tier, but there are many excellent free VPNs available.
Both TunnelBear and AnchorFree Hotspot Shield offer free subscriptions with data limitations.
ProtonVPN, which is our Editors' Choice for free VPNs, also has a free tier, one that only limits the servers you can connect to, not the amount of data you can protect.
Looking at just the price of a monthly subscription and what features are offered, TigerVPN isn't an outstanding value.
NordVPN costs more, at $11.95, but it has more features and servers available.
Private Internet Access costs dramatically less—just $6.95 per month.
But it, too, has more to offer than TigerVPN.
As with all VPN services, I recommend trying out a short-term subscription before you commit.
You may find that a VPN that worked great for me isn't a good fit for you.
TigerVPN offers a seven-day money back guarantee, which I recommend new users try.
TigerVPN accepts Visa and Mastercard, as well as PayPal and Paymentwall.
It also accepts anonymous transactions via Bitcoin.
Torrenters will appreciate that TigerVPN allows BitTorrent and P2P file sharing on its servers.
Most VPNs allow BitTorrent, although some require you to use specific servers for such activities.
TorGuard is perhaps the best equipped for torrenting, and offers some specific features frequent seeders and leechers will appreciate.
VPN Protocols Offered by TigerVPN
VPNs are an established technology and, as such, there are many ways to create a VPN connection.
I'm happy to see that TigerVPN uses my preferred option, OpenVPN.
This VPN protocol is known for its speed and reliability, but what I like about it is that it's open-source.
That means its code has been picked over for any potential vulnerabilities.
The company also supports IKEv2 for iOS (more on this later) as well as L2TP and PPTP.
These last two options are older and generally regarded as less secure, but are included for legacy support.
There is no option to switch VPN protocols within the TigerVPN Windows app, however.
If you want to use a different protocol with TigerVPN, you have to manually configure the built-in VPN client in Windows.
TigerVPN Servers and Server Locations
One metric I pay particular attention to is the number of servers each company provides and the geographic distribution of those servers.
More servers generally means you're more likely to have better performance, since there should be fewer people per server.
TigerVPN offers about 300 servers, which is a decidedly small collection.
NordVPN has over 5,000, and three other top-rated VPN services have at least 3,000: Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and TorGuard among them.
Geographic distribution is also important.
Given more and more varied server locations, you are more likely to find a server nearby and thus enjoy better performance.
A wide variety of server locations also is useful when traveling, since you're more likely to find a local server to use.
Even if you don't travel, having more server locations available is useful, because it means that you have more places from which to spoof your location.
TigerVPN covers 62 individual server locations across 43 countries.
That's a fairly strong showing.
Golden Frog VyprVPN supports 70 server locations and NordVPN covers about 61 countries.
Notably, TigerVPN has very good geographic diversity, with several server locations in places often other VPN companies ignore, such as Africa and South America.
The company also has servers in regions known to censor internet connections, such as China, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam.
I don't believe it's safe for someone like me to make choice about the best VPNs for regions with repressive internet policies, but I'm glad to see them supported.
Some readers have expressed concern over virtual VPN servers.
These are software-defined servers, so one physical server can host several virtual servers.
These virtual servers can be configured to appear as if they are in a different location than their physical host, which is a problem if you're deeply concerned about where, exactly, your traffic is going.
Hide My Ass VPN, for example, is able to list over 260 server locations because it relies so heavily on virtualized servers.
TigerVPN does use some virtualization in order to meet demand, but says that every available server is located exactly where it appears to be.
Your Privacy With TigerVPN
A VPN should make you more secure, not less.
A VPN shouldn't leak data, and it shouldn't gather information about you unecessarily.
It especially shouldn't sell that data.
Information about what information a VPN company gathers and why can be found in its Privacy Policy.
These tend to be lengthy, sometimes confusing documents.
Fear not: I've done the reading for you.
TigerVPN's privacy policy is on the beefy side.
It's long, and occasionally confusing, but does take the time to add mirth and useful examples to explain certain topics.
According to the policy, the company monitors the time of connection and disconnection, the duration of the connection, and the amount of traffic.
That's pretty standard.
Although TigerVPN makes an effort to point out that because customers share IP addresses, it's difficult to determine which person is responsible for what traffic, even if it were observed.
The company also gathers the information you submit when creating your account.
Again, this is standard.
The company says:
At no time, we store, read, analyze or in any other way process the traffic exchanged between you, our servers and the public internet.
In other words, we do not save, read or have technical access to any DNS queries, websites you visit, data you transferred or communications.
TigerVPN sells subscription to pay for its service and has never and will never sell, share, or give away any data.
While many VPN companies gather some statistical information, TigerVPN says it receives "randomized" country statistics.
In the company's words:
The only information we get from this country statistic is that Country A favors to connect to Country B.
Therefore we know to buy additional bandwidth for these destinations and to increase capacity.
This is not concerning on its face, but is unusual in that I haven't seen any other VPN company mention this particular kind of information gathering.
It's possible others do, but call it something different.
One interesting point is that TigerVPN acknowledges paying Valued Added Tax, or VAT, and requires your IP address to determine your geographic location and the appropriate tax rate.
TigerVPN explains:
We delete the IP address and only store the country information (e.g.
Germany) and keep that information for accounting and tax purposes.
Your IP address is not stored and therefore no personal identifiable data is stored alongside when processing your payment data.
Because a VPN company has as much insight into your online activities as your ISP, it's a good idea to understand how the company makes money.
It wouldn't make sense to use a VPN that simply sold your data.
In the case of TigerVPN, a company representative says that it only receives revenue from VPN sales.
It's also important to know where a VPN company is located, and under which legal jurisdiction they operate.
TigerVPN is headquartered in the EU country of Slovakia, with offices in Romania, and operates under Slovakian law.
The company says that it is GDPR compliant.
It's up to you to decide what impact a VPN's location has on your likelihood of subscribing to it, however.
Hands On With TigerVPN
My relationship with TigerVPN got off to a rocky start when my attempts to purchase a subscription were met with a cryptic error message.
The issue turned out to be with TigerVPN's payment processor not liking my American Express card.
It was eventually resolved, but it is odd that such a straightforward problem took so many days to solve.
Subscription in hand, I installed the TigerVPN app on my Windows 10 test machine.
It was a fast process, one that gave me no headaches.
Most VPN services provide an installer that makes setting up a VPN a snap, and TigerVPN is no exception.
The TigerVPN app is a small white window that is simple enough.
The company's tiger mascot grins at you while the app is open, but TigerVPN lacks the friendliness of TunnelBear's bears or the clever, stylish design of NordVPN's app.
The main screen shows a list of available servers, and you can favorite servers you're likely to use often.
Note that information about your favorite servers is stored by TigerVPN and synced between your devices.
The default Recommended option connects you with what the app thinks is the best VPN server—probably the one closest to your actual location.
A search option lets you quickly narrow down the list.
That's all fine, but I like to get a little more information from my VPN app.
ProtonVPN, for example, clearly marks all of its specialized servers and lets you drill down to see individual servers.
TigerVPN only lists the locations by city, not the actual servers, and it doesn't show any stats about those servers' performance.
I actually struggled to get online with TigerVPN.
Not because of any technical issue, but because I assumed that clicking the toggle switch on the main screen would start the VPN.
Not so: you have to click on a server from the list to get online.
Oddly, you do use that toggle switch to disconnect.
It's a bit confusing, and quite different from friendly, easy-to-use services like TunnelBear.
Another quirk of the TigerVPN app is that it's very slow to launch and slow to start the VPN connection.
That's annoying and might confuse some users, who may question whether or not the service is doing anything at all.
There are few settings options in the app.
The most notable is the TCP override, which uses the slower UDP TCP/IP protocol to create a more stable connection.
You can also configure the app to start automatically when the computer powers on, which can be handy.
I do like that the app has a Troubleshooting section and links to a useful Status page that shows any company announcements and the status of each of the company's VPN servers.
One interesting aspect of TigerVPN is its Karma Point system.
The company gives you a series of challenges, such liking the company on Facebook or Tweeting with a particular hashtag, each worth a certain number of Karma Points.
You can trade in these points for additional connections, which start at 3,000 KP for one connection and 12,000 KP for four.
For comparison, liking the company on Facebook is only worth 250 KP while writing a review (note: it doesn't say a positive review) on Verified-Reviews.com is worth 3,000 KP.
TunnelBear offers something similar for users of its free subscription, although it will only net you an additional 500Mb of data per month.
Other services have been more aggressive with these kind of marketing tactics.
One company instructed its users to send Tweets to me in exchange for perks.
That didn't work out so well.
TigerVPN and Netflix
VPNs not only help protect your identity and your information, they can also be used to spoof your location and access streaming content that's blocked in your country.
That's probably why Netflix is so aggressive about blocking VPNs.
Interestingly, using a VPN is not necessarily against Netflix's terms of service.
But section 4.3 of those terms does hint at Netflix's reasoning for blocking VPNs:
You may view Netflix content primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such content.
The content that...
