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“We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer our website and servers, track access, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.”
TotalVPN Review
Bad billing practices and loads of user complaints led to the demise of this poor provider.
By Mauricio Prinzlau ( CEO & Co-Founder )
— Last Updated: 25 Feb’21 2021-02-25T14:32:04+00:00
Chief Editor’s Note
TotalVPN has been out of business for a while now, so disregard this review as we’re only keeping it around for archival purposes. We recommend you check out our best VPN roundup for working providers, instead.
TotalVPN is the new VPN service provider on the block, and they are growing at a fast rate.
They actually have a more than adequate service in many regards – and they need to, because they are competing with industry giants.
But don’t let their young age fool you. I was skeptical at first, but pleasantly surprised when I tested out their service.
Like other services, they help users mask their IP address and encrypt data transmissions so governmental agencies and hackers can’t steal your data. They can help unblock geo-restricted content, but they may not be a good fit for international users, citizens of small countries, and travelers because their network is relatively small compared to other mature services.
With that said, for how new they are it is surprising how polished their service is. The interface is clean, as is the website, and they have put together a solid service that will satisfy most users’ needs.
To get a better understanding of this new service, let’s take a closer look at their features.
Pricing & Features
Everything about TotalVPN seems to be made elegantly simple. Instead of a complex pricing and packaging system, users only have to choose from one of two options: free or paid. The free version is really only a way to test out their service though, because it has some harsh restrictions. Limitations include the ability to only connect to 3 locations, bandwidth and data transfer limits, and only 1 active device connection.
Free
FREE
Total Premium
1-month plan
That said, there are many providers that won’t even offer a free trial. Users who want to purchase their service only need to pay $4.99 per month. The paid plan allows users to connect to all locations (30+ global locations at the moment), no bandwidth or data restrictions, 3 simultaneous connections, and a proxy service.
And that’s it. There are no long term subscriptions with extra bells and whistles – only the free plan or the monthly plan. And even though they’re a young business, they do have servers in all of the most popular geographic regions including:
- The US
- Europe
- Southeast Asia
- Hong Kong
- Buenos Aires
- Africa
They also do a good job of including all the features users have come to expect as standard from a competent VPN service provider.
They are available on all the major operating systems including Windwos, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, Android Tablet, Android, and they are even working on an app for Chromebook. In addition, they do have 24/7 customer support (which we’ll discuss later). And, like other providers, they have a 99.99% uptime guarantee – meaning that their servers will be up all of the time save for a technical difficulty here and there.
And if they do have a technical difficulty, it will be isolated to a location or small group of servers. It simply isn’t plausible that all of the servers they maintain would go down. This guarantee is pretty standard, but you’d be surprised at how many services don’t properly plan for capacity. Furthermore, they use all of the latest and greatest encryption algorithms to ensure that users’ data is untouchable as it is in transit from the user’s computer to the VPN server.
Connection options include PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP/IPSec and IkeV2. Though this may sound fantastic, it’s really becoming the norm, and every competent provider will offer these connection options. However, even though they offer PPTP as a connection option, we recommend that users avoid using this protocol. It only offers weak encryption, and believe it or not, it can be cracked.
Privacy & Security
Is TotalVPN Safe?
Though they do secure users’ data by encrypting it in a manner that makes it impossible for third parties to read data, there is one extremely concerning portion of their terms of use document. Personally, I think they are just trying to keep their hands clean legally by reserving the right to disclose information, but it’s frightening nonetheless.
The following is their policy on law enforcement:
“Total VPN may disclose User information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the User upon lawful request from such agencies. We cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.”
In addition, they do log some specific types of information that is pretty typical among VPN service providers.
They track small amounts of personal information (such as account details and email), login cookies so you can save your user credentials, and the following types of log files:
- When you login to their service
- The IP address used to login to their service
- Username
These logs are fairly common, because it helps the service plan for capacity requirements and network expansion. They explicitly state the following in their privacy policy:
“We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer our website and servers, track access, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.”
However, they certainly don’t keep any usage logs of user activity or personal data. Once your Internet traffic is encapsulated inside the VPN tunnel, there’s nothing to worry about – no one can see your information. Also, they take great care to protect users’ information. It would be pretty embarrassing for a security firm to lose information to hackers or employees.
They do take stringent measure to safeguard account information, as stated in their privacy policy:
“Total VPN uses technical security measures to prevent the loss, misuse, altering or unauthorized disclosure of information under our control. Such security measures include but are not limited to: physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.”
Last but not least, users should be aware of their acceptable use policy. This is pretty common and straightforward, but it’s worth mentioning that the following are not tolerated:
- Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights
- Illegal Activities
- Non-Personal Use
- Sexual Exploitation of Minors
In a nutshell, their acceptable use policy and privacy policy are pretty typical. The only thing I didn’t like was the reservation to comply with law enforcement – which is admittedly understandable.
Still, it makes it seem like they would rather forfeit information instead of standing up for their users. But as we all know from the NSA PRISM wiretapping scandal, when it comes to the government and law enforcement, tech companies’ hands are tied.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Though not a perfect service, they are certainly a viable option for people who want to secure their Internet connection. Here’s what I liked and what I didn’t like:
Strengths:
- Decent speeds
- Strong encryption algorithms
- Free trial
- Good 24/7 support
Weaknesses:
- The knowledge-base is a little thin
- Users might want discounted saving for longer term subscriptions
- Legal disclaimers in their privacy policy regarding the forfeiture of information
All in all, I was moderately pleased with their service. However, they lack some of the advanced features that other providers include such as a NAT firewall, VPN kill-switch, DNS leak protection, and other special features. Right now their service is streamlined, lightweight, clean, and simple. I would expect them to bolster their features and their global network as they grow as a company, and perhaps even change their pricing model as they mature – but that’s just speculation.
It’s true that they aren’t the cheapest service on the market, but they aren’t based in the United States, which is a huge plus. I see them as a great provider for users around the world, but I think European users would like them best because that’s where the highest concentration of their servers are located. If your curious, I would recommend that you at least try out their free trial.
But what does it all boil down to? Should you buy their service? That’s a decision I’ll leave up to you, but I think that they are reasonably priced for the quality of service they provide. They’re certainly a far cry from being a terrible, frustrating service. And I’m curious to see how things pan out in the future. If this is how good their service is now as a young company, I’d imagine their service is only going to improve in the coming months.
Performance
Overall, I was fairly pleased with the speed test. Before we dig into the results, I want to define a few parameters. First off, understand that I ran the speed test on an ADSL Internet connection with 5Mbps download speed and theoretically 1Mbps upload.
Furthermore, I connected to the Hong Kong server, and I ran a standard speed test as well as a ping to Google’s DNS servers to track latency. The results are as follows:
- Download: 4.64Mbps
- Upload: 0.93
- Speed Test Server Ping: 62ms
- Google DNS Ping: approximately 88ms
So far, so good. They certainly aren’t the fastest VPN I’ve tested, but they’re far from the worst, too. To further test the connection, I tried to stream some YouTube content, and it worked just fine.
I didn’t even have any time spent waiting for the video to buffer. But what do these speed statistics mean for different types of traffic and overall performance? Well, for starters, I did lose a small portion of my total upload and download bandwidth.
However, this is to be expected. The fact of the matter is that any VPN service is going to introduce overhead to your Internet connection. However, this small amount of overhead is not unreasonable.
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that the ping times were so low. A connection this fast will easily accommodate the vast majority of users’ needs. Online storage, streaming audio and video, and common web browsing aren’t an issue. Furthermore, even VoIP calls would be high quality on this connection, which is interesting because audio is highly sensitive to latency.
The average VoIP call needs less than 300ms of latency, and this connection easily meets that requirement. However, I’m not sure that this is the best option for users who have extremely demanding needs. One application type that comes to mind is real-time gaming, which is extremely sensitive to latency. In the end, it all depends where the game server is located and where your VPN connection terminates.
For gamers, I would say that there are certainly faster connections with other providers that are a better fit for gaming.
Customer Support
Customer support is a big deal for users who are non-technical. Though TotalVPN worked fine when I tested them, consider that every startup or burgeoning service is going to experience some growing pains. As such, customer support is likely more of an important factor with TotalVPN than it is with other providers. Surprisingly, they actually have great customer support.
Like most of the other providers, they have a live chat feature on their website, which is essentially a way to ping the support staff with an instant message. I actually prefer these options to awful telephony support queues where you have to spend hours listening to elevator music before being transferred to an agent. In addition, users can initiate a service request with via email.
Not only do they have customer support representatives standing by, but they also have a handy knowledgebase on their website. For those of you who don’t feel comfortable setting up VPN software, the knowledgebase has setup guides for Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, and Android. The general help section is a little thin, but it does cover all the basics.
Last but not least, the help center page even has troubleshooting guides. Again, I think they do a good job of covering their bases, I simply can’t say that it is comprehensive. But then again, that’s what the customer support agents are for.
And as for the website – it is very clean, attractive, and easy to navigate. There was one thing I didn’t like about it though. Users first have to sign in and create an account before they can access the customer support page. This is a bit of a hassle, and it feels like there’s just one more hoop to jump through to get access to support.
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TotalVPN
30 Day Money-Back Guarantee
We’re so confident that you won’t want to leave Total VPN, we’ll give you your money back if you do. No questions asked.
During the first 30 days, if you decide Total VPN isn’t for you, we’ll refund your subscription fees in full. Your satisfaction is our top priority, and we’re so confident that you’ll be pleased with our services:
- How easy it is to protect your devices
- 24×7 customer phone support available
For full information on our Refund and Cancellation Policy including how to cancel please click here.
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Our continuous protection service allows us to ensure you are fully protected from harmful threats & viruses with an uninterrupted service.
We often offer promotional discounts and special introductory offers to new customers during their initial subscription term. These special offers and introductory offers are available to new customers only and are valid for the initial subscription term only.
You will receive an email reminder at least 30 days before your renewal charge takes place, notifying you of the charge date along with any applicable changes.
At the end of each subscription period we will auto-renew your subscription for another term (until you cancel) by charging your payment method on file at the then current regular rate.
The current regular rate for our annual Password Manager is £119 (inc. VAT), which is subject to change, details of which can be found here. If you wish to opt-out of the automatic renewal you can do so within the billing section of your account, alternatively you can speak with our billing department should you require assistance.
TotalVPN Review 2023 – Why 8.0 Stars?
TotalVPN is going out of business, and the company no longer accepts new customers or extends subscriptions.
The company, however, will remain active for all existing customers until the renewal date.
We spoke with TotalVPN’s customer service to confirm this:
For current customers, we included our original review below.
Looking for a straight-forward VPN service with good network speed? TotalVPN is a good choice. While this provider does not offer the highest number of servers or the highest degree of customer data security, it does enable quality internet access and content streaming for reasonable prices.
TotalVPN offers 60 servers total across six continents (everywhere but Antarctica):
• 21 in North America
• 25 in Europe
• 9 in Asia
• 1 in Africa
• 1 in South America
• 3 in Oceania
In our tests using a Mac in a public Wifi hotspot, the network supported streaming content from YouTube without interruptions or delays. During regular web surfing, images and pages rendered quickly. Overall, the network performed so well it was hard to tell a VPN was running at all.
Offering unlimited data with their premium plan, you can stream videos and browse the internet as much as you want. In addition, they boast a 99.99% uptime, which means that you will almost never be disconnected. And just in case you are disconnected, your information will not be shared until you are reconnected, protecting your personal data and IP address.
They also have VPN routers, if you need one. If you require information on how to use their services for your device, you can find guides on their site to help you.
TotalVPN offers a client for just about every device: Mac OS, Windows, iOS and Android. It does not have a client for the Google Chromebook, but they say coverage for this device is coming soon. For customers paying for the premium plan, they don’t cap their bandwidth, so your content doesn’t buffer. They use industry-leading encryption with OpenVPN, PPTP, Cisco IPSec, and IkeV2. In case you ever have a problem, they are available twenty-four seven via email or chat, 365 days a year.
To show its dedication to web anonymity, TotalVPN does not log your browsing history. Unfortunately, it does keep a little bit more information than some other service providers. They collect the IP address where you logged in and your username. They also keep authentication logs that include source IP addresses, VPN username, and protocol used.
If you prefer not to pay for a VPN service, then you can sign up for a TotalVPN free plan. However, you are limited to three servers, throttled data transfer and bandwidth, and just one device connection. We don’t recommend this at all.
TotalVPN Features — 2023 Update
8.0
| 💸 Price | 4.99 USD/month |
| 📆 Money Back Guarantee | 30 Days |
| 📝 Does VPN keep logs? | Partially |
| 🖥 Number of servers | 38+ |
| 💻 Number of devices per license | 3 |
| 🛡 Kill switch | No |
| 📥 Supports torrenting | Yes |