Avast doesn’t just do antivirus, but also has a VPN offering.
One of the biggest names in the VPN business, HideMyAss! (HMA) has been protecting its users’ privacy for more than 15 years, and it’s been owned by security giant Avast since 2016. The company offers a vast network of 1,000+ servers in 290+ locations across 190+ countries. That’s fewer servers than some of the top providers, but many more locations and countries (NordVPN has 5,800+ servers across 59 countries, ExpressVPN has 3,000+ servers across 160 locations and 94 countries). There’s P2P support, but only on a handful of locations, in fact just eight via our Windows client (five in Europe, three in the US). Industrial-strength privacy is provided via OpenVPN and IKEv2 support, AES-256-GCM data encryption, RSA-4096 for handshaking and SHA-256 data authentication. HideMyAss! has its own DNS service to help avoid DNS leaks and, as a bonus, it blocks access to malicious and phishing sites. The HideMyAss! website proudly proclaims that it works on all your devices, and it just might have a point. Not only are there custom apps for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Linux, but there’s installation advice to help you manually set up the service on many other platforms. And that includes the ability to configure some routers, which in theory should allow you to use the service with all your smart devices, too. The apps have been updated to version 5.0 since our last review, and now feature a streamlined new interface, an enhanced Location Picker, improved kill switches and split tunneling on Android. Oh, there’s also a Chrome browser extension, and support for Android TV, too. Editor’s Note: What immediately follows is a rundown of the latest changes and additions since this review was last updated. Head off to the official HideMyAss! pricing page and the company looks distinctly short on plans, with just one-year and three-year options. In reality, HideMyAss! has more plans than most of the competition, they’re just not easy to find on the website. No, that doesn’t make any sense to us, either, but there’s a summary of what’s available in this blog post. The monthly plan is priced at $11.99. That’s in the range you’d expect from a top VPN, but not something that’s suitable for more than a very occasional one-off month. (Surfshark gives you two years of service for under $48, or $1.99 a month). The six-month plan is also more expensive than we’d like at $7.99 a month. The price drops to $5.99 over a year, $4.99 over two years, and $3.99 over three. If you’re happy with the company, these aren’t bad prices, but many other providers offer much better value. You can sign up with Private Internet Access for just $3.33 a month, for instance, and that’s just on the annual plan – there is no need to pay for several years upfront. A Family plan gets you a year of coverage for everyone in your household, and supports up to 10 simultaneous connections, for $12.99 a month. It’s good that this option is provided, but you could buy up to six Surfshark two-year plans for less money. HideMyAss! Business plans enable supporting more simultaneous connections. These are priced much the same as the Family plan – around $13 a month for 10 connections, $26 for 20, $39 for 30 – and HideMyAss! can do tailored quotes if you need more. Bitcoin isn’t accepted, whatever plan you choose, but HideMyAss! does support cards and PayPal. A 7-day free trial gives you a decent amount of time to try out the service, something you won’t get with most of the competition. You must hand over your payment details, and you’re automatically billed for the annual plan when the trial ends, unless you cancel (which is easy to do online). If you buy, and then run into problems, you’re protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. This had some annoying catches a few years ago (it was only valid for customers who used less than 10GB of data and made fewer than 100 connections), but they’ve been ditched, and if anything, the small print is more generous than most. For instance, if you’ve had one refund from a VPN, then most won’t give you another, even years later. HideMyAss! will give you as many as appropriate, just as long as there’s at least six months between refund requests. HideMyAss! has so much small print that the Legal section has a sidebar with no less than 10 separate sections, and many of those are also very lengthy (the privacy policy alone has more than 3,500 words). This isn’t quite as bad as it first sounds. The main reason for the cluster of documents is that HideMyAss! has moved key sections into separate articles, making them easier to find, and most of these are clearly structured and well-written. The privacy policy explains that there’s no logging of originating IP addresses (a possible way to identify you), DNS queries, or any details on the websites you’re visiting or what you’re doing online. There is some session logging, though. The service records the timestamp of every session connect and disconnect, a subnet of the IP address you used to connect to the service (if you connect from 92.
