Virtual Private Networks have become enormously popular, compelling VPN providers to go bigger and better with their products lest they be lost among the competition.
Trust.Zone, however, is not that kind of VPN company.
While it offers affordable pricing and turns in decent results in our speed tests, it has a small server network, you get only three licenses with a subscription, and it only offers a client for Windows—and a so-so one at that.
The best VPNs we've tested, NordVPN, Private Internet Access, and TunnelBear VPN, offer more.
What Is a VPN?
The threats online are many and manifest.
Three-letter intelligence agencies gobble up all the traffic they can, while advertisers seek to track your movement across websites to sell you a new chair.
Attackers might be lurking on public Wi-Fi networks, or even impersonating trusted Wi-Fi networks, to steal your passwords and sensitive information.
Thankfully, there are VPNs.
If that all sounds too unlikely to be a real danger, consider that the biggest threat to your privacy is probably your ISP.
Congress has given the thumbs-up to internet providers to sell anonymized data about their users, which means you.
If that makes you feel gross, consider calling your elected representative—right after you get yourself a VPN.
A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a server controlled by the VPN company.
All your web traffic is routed through the tunnel, which keeps prying eyes out.
Even clever attackers on your network, or in control of your network, won't be able to get a peek.
With a VPN, you can spoof your location by selecting a distant VPN server, or tunnel past local censorship.
For those reasons, VPNs have long been the tools of journalists and political dissidents operating in repressive countries.
You can use those same properties for a more entertaining purpose by unlocking streaming services with a VPN.
That said, companies such as Netflix have become quite adept at blocking VPNs and do so with vigor.
It's up to you to research what terms of services or even local laws you might be breaking by doing so, however.
It's important to understand that VPNs aren't a magic bullet.
If you're connecting to a site that doesn't use HTTPS, your traffic will no longer be encrypted after it leaves the VPN server.
And while VPNs do provide a measure of anonymity by routing your traffic to a VPN server (and lumping it in with everyone else using that server), you need a tool like Tor to really hide your identity online.
Pricing and Features
A subscription from Trust.Zone costs $6.99 per month, putting it well below the $10.38 per month average of Daxdi's top-rated VPNs.
In fact, you won't find many less expensive VPNs.
Private Internet Access ($69.95 for Two-Year Plan + Two-Months Free at Private Internet Access) is $6.95 per month, and Norton Wi-Fi Privacy a mere $4.99 per month.
That said, Trust.Zone only offers three simultaneous connections with its base subscription, so while you may be paying less, you're also getting less.
The industry average is five, putting Trust.Zone well behind the competition.
You can upgrade to five simultaneous connections with Trust.Zone, but it will cost you $3.99 more per month, which actually puts it a little bit above the average price for five licenses per month.
NordVPN ($89 for Two-Year Plan With Bonus Gift at NordVPN) offers six connections, CyberGhost offers seven connections, and TorGuard lets customers use a slider to choose the number of simultaneous connections at checkout.
As with other VPN companies, Trust.Zone offers discounts if you opt for longer subscriptions.
You can opt to pay $14.85 every three months or $39.95 once per year.
The company supports all major credit cards but, curiously, does not support PayPal.
Trust.Zone also accepts Bitcoin, so you can make your VPN purchases anonymously.
The company offers a 10 percent discount on Bitcoin payments, which I have never seen before with VPNs.
Trust.Zone does not offer a free plan, but you can try the service for free for up to three days.
This comes with some restrictions.
You only get 1GB of data, can only access 111 VPN servers, and are limited to just one connection at a time.
However, it is possible to get a free VPN.
TunnelBear and AnchorFree Hotspot Shield both offer free subscriptions, but do limit how much data you can use per month.
ProtonVPN also offers a limited free option, but lets you go nuts with the data.
BitTorrenters will be pleased to know that Trust.Zone does allow P2P file sharing on its networks.
Its policies do, however, ask that you refrain from illegal activity when connected to Trust.Zone.
For heavy-duty BitTorrent and file sharing over VPN, we recommend TorGuard.
As mentioned above sites like Netflix don't take kindly to customers connecting via VPN and will block them until they switch the VPN off.
If you're concerned about not being to access some sites and services from a VPN, you may want to buy access to a static IP address.
This unique address is, ideally, not associated with a VPN company and is less likely to be blocked by Netflix and other streaming video services.
Trust.Zone previously offered static IP addresses for $9.99 per month, but the option has been removed from the company's site.
VPN Protocols
VPNs have been around for a long time, and there are now several ways to cook up a good encrypted tunnel.
I generally prefer the OpenVPN protocol, which is newer, generally faster, and open source, so its code has been thoroughly picked over for potential vulnerabilities.
Trust.Zone supports OpenVPN, as well as IKEv2, another new and secure protocol.
The company also supports L2TP/IPSec, which are older and unlikely to have compatibility issues with devices.
Trust.Zone uses its own VPN protocol by default in its Windows client, although you can change it in the client's settings.
A company representative tells me that this protocol uses AES-256 for data encryption and RSA-4096 for handshake encryption.
This protocol is intended to bypass deep-packet inspection, which is sometimes used to identify and block VPN connections, particularly in countries with repressive governments.
While it's not a good idea to create your own encryption protocol, I've seen several VPN companies offer tweaked VPN protocols built on established standards.
AnchorFree Hotspot Shield, for example, only connects via its custom Hydra protocol.
Because most other VPN services offer first-party clients for different platforms, customers typically don't need to worry about supported protocols.
But Trust.Zone only supplies client software for Windows.
That means if you want to use Trust.Zone with any other device, protocols will matter a lot because you'll have to muck around with manual configurations.
For an example of just how complicated this can be, read my story on how to set up a VPN on a Chromebook.
Servers and Server Locations
The size and distribution of a VPN company's server network is more than just a number to brag about: it can affect how available the service will be for customers and how the service will perform.
If a VPN company has lots of servers, there will likely be fewer people per server.
A smaller allotment of users per server means that each one of those individual users gets a larger share of the bandwidth pie, likely resulting in better performance.
That could be an issue with Trust.Zone, which has only 127 servers.
That's a far cry from the 500 server minimum I have come to expect from top-performing VPN companies.
It's a distant scream from the 4,800 servers offered by NordVPN, which has the largest server network I've yet seen.
Private Internet Access, and TorGuard are also notable for having over 3,000 servers, placing them far above the competition.
The number of server locations and the distribution of those servers is also an important consideration.
For one thing, having more server locations means you have more choices about where to spoof your location, but it also has an impact on VPN performance.
You're likely to get the best speeds from a server that is located close to your actual location.
If the VPN company doesn't have a server nearby, your web browsing will take a hit.
Trust.Zone has servers across 32 countries, which it bundles variously into 80 "zones." That's not very much compared to the competition: IPVanish and NordVPN cover over 60 countries, and CyberGhost some 90 locations across various countries.
Hide My Ass VPN leads the pack in distribution, supporting 286 server locations in 220 countries.
Trust.Zone has a solid server distribution, covering all the major regions of the earth and a few that are typically underserved by VPN companies.
The fact that Trust.Zone has servers in South Africa is noteworthy, as far too many VPNs ignore Africa entirely.
Also notable is that Trust.Zone has servers in India, Hong Kong, and mainland China—the last of which has moved to block VPN access.
However, Trust.Zone lacks servers in other heavily censored countries such as Cuba, Russia, and Turkey.
Some readers have expressed concern about VPN companies using virtual servers.
These are software-defined servers, meaning that a physical server could be home to many virtual servers.
Interestingly, virtual servers can be configured to appear as if they are in a different location than the physical server that hosts them.
This matters if you're deeply concerned about where, specifically, your data is going.
In the case of Trust.Zone, a representative tells me that the company owns some physical servers and has direct access to them.
In other locations with "lower utilization" Trust.Zone rents servers from third parties, but the representative says the company only uses dedicated servers.
The gold standard when it comes to server and network security is probably ProtonVPN.
This company has physical access to several of its servers, which are housed below ground in a vault.
Customers can opt to have their VPN traffic routed through these servers for extra assurance that their data is secure.
Your Privacy With Trust.Zone
One of the most compelling reasons to get a VPN is that it protects your online activities from the prying eyes of your ISP.
But that means that the VPN company could, if it wanted, snoop on your traffic, and even sell data about you to anyone who asked.
That's why it's important that your VPN company be trustworthy.
What a VPN company does with your information is usually outlined in its corporate privacy policy.
I found Trust.Zone's privacy policy to be clear and concise.
It hit all the right points, saying it keeps no logs of user activity, and only retains user email addresses that are provided at signup.
It's ideal that a VPN company retain as little as possible about its customers and their activity.
That way, if the company were to be hacked or subpoenaed by law enforcement, there would be nothing of value obtained.
When I review VPNs, I ask company reps the same set of questions to ensure that they're on the up and up.
They could lie to my face, but my goal is to get companies on record with their positions.
Trust.Zone gave me good answers, on the whole.
For example, when I asked if the company generated revenue from sources other than customer subscription, a company representative said that it had no other money-making avenues.
That's good, because it means the VPN company isn't monetizing data from or about its customers.
When I asked what information they gathered, the company's answer was in line with its privacy policy.
A company representative also told me that Trust.Zone doesn't use third party tools such as Google Analytics, out of an abundance of concern regarding privacy.
It's important to know where a VPN company is physically located.
That way, you'll know under which legal jurisdiction the company operates and whether the company has mandatory data retention policies.
Trust.Zone is located in the Seychelles, and is not subject to any data retention policies.
Hands On With Trust.Zone
As noted, Trust.Zone only supplies a native client for Windows machines.
You can still use any device you like with Trust.Zone, but you'll have to either configure the operating system's built-in VPN client manually or download a third-party client like the one available for OpenVPN connections.
It's a tedious process and not consumer friendly by any stretch of the imagination.
When I first began testing Trust.Zone, installing the client on my Lenovo ThinkPad T460s laptop running Windows 10 was a bit of a mess.
Everything seemed fine, but I received cryptic error messages whenever I tried to connect to the VPN.
A Trust.Zone representative referred me to an FAQ article that saying that to use the Trust.Zone application on Windows 10, you must first disable Driver Signature Enforcement.
The article also says that to disable Driver Signature Enforcement you "may need to Disable UEFI Secure Boot in BIOS." All the other VPN clients I have tested made the process of setting up a VPN incredibly simple.
I raised my concerns with a Trust.Zone representative who insisted that using unsigned drivers helped protect consumers, somehow.
I disagreed, as did Microsoft experts I consulted.
However, the point became moot when Trust.Zone pushed out an update to its installer so that it no longer requires you to mess around with your computer's default security settings.
The company apparently found a workaround that satisfied its desire to not use signed drivers and still provide an effective one-click installation.
I'm glad they addressed the issue, but it worries me that it was an issue in the first place.
The Trust.Zone Windows client (again, the company's only client) is a bit of a clunky affair.
A simple window in blue and yellow, it has a large button at the center to begin a new connection.
Click, and you'll shortly be connected to the VPN server of your choice, or whichever server the app judges to be the best.
You can switch servers easily, and make a few modest adjustments from the Settings panel.
It lacks the polish I've come to expect from VPN services.
Private Internet Access also has an austere client, but it also has much more to offer than Trust.Zone.
Trust.Zone and Netflix
Many streaming companies restrict content to people in certain countries.
Netflix in Germany, for example, might have a different slate of TV and movies than Netflix in the US.
If you want to see a show that's on Netflix in a...
