HideMy.name VPN review

HideMy.name might not be a well-known name among VPN providers on the market, but it isn’t on the right track to becoming one. It is a complete anonymity and geo-unblocking service that ticks all the right VPN boxes, as you’ll have the chance to experience yourself thanks to its free trial.

• You can sign up to HideMy.name here.

Price

There are six options under which you can purchase this provider’s services: 1-month at $8/month, 6-month at $4/month (charged $24 every 6 months), 1-year at $3/month (charged $36 every year), 2-year at $2.5/month (billed $60 every 2 years), 3-year at $2.4/month ($86 every 3 years), and even a 5-year subscription at $2/month (billed $120 every 5 years). These rates are among the cheapest on the market.

Accepted payment methods include credit/debit cards, PayPal, WebMoney, and cryptocurrencies. With one account, you can run up to 5 simultaneous VPN connections.

HideMy.name allows you to test its platform fully during a 24-hour free trial. Just type in your email address, and you’ll immediately get an activation code to use during this period and get full access to the VPN. If you decide you like it, you can simply click on the link inside the app and it will take you to the pricing page.

After you purchase a subscription, and then realize you’ve made a mistake, there’s a generous, 30-day money-back guarantee you can use to get a refund.

Alternatives

HideMy.name is a truly great VPN service, although it lacks some of the advantages you might see if you subscribe to, say, ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, or CyberGhost. This mainly concerns the number of servers and more features in the apps. However, HideMy.name does have an advantage over them in its multitude of pricing plans and some of the lowest prices on the market.

Streaming

This VPN vendor can provide access to popular geographically restricted streaming services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer in regions where they’re unavailable. You just need to connect to a server in a country where this service isn’t blocked.

About the company

The company operating the HideMy.name VPN is headquartered in Belize City, Belize, a place known for the lack of prying governmental practices on its soil. It offers access to 300 shared IPs on 110 servers scattered across 81 cities in 45 countries, including in Bulgaria, Egypt, Israel, Luxembourg, Indonesia, Russia, Singapore, and others.

Privacy and encryption

HideMy.name relies on the standard list of connection protocols to safeguard your privacy, including OpenVPN TCP and UDP, L2TP, PPTP, and IKEv2. It also uses several types of encryption: AES-256-CBC (most secure), AES-128-CBC (faster), and BF-CBC (old, not recommended).

As a welcome extra, its Chameleon technology uses additional encryption to help you to bypass active VPN blocking in more restrictive regions. Apps also have a kill switch option that you can keep turned off, have it activate when connected to VPN or when logging into the program. A kill switch is an additional mechanism of protection which shuts down your entire Internet connection if the VPN is interrupted, protecting you sensitive information from leaking into the wrong hands.

In the vendor’s Privacy Policy, we get all the details about what is and isn’t logged when you’re using HideMy.name’s services. Specifically, it states that it processes “a non-persistent log of connection data, that includes customers’ randomly generated username and internally assigned, non-public IP address”, which is maintained exclusively for troubleshooting purposes and is erased every few hours. It will also process your traffic volume after the end of each connection “in order to update the traffic usage counters” and aggregate monthly data to “maintain a high level of service quality”.

The company asserts that it “purposely and strictly do not record any other data. Your browsing behavior is not monitored or recorded by us. It is impossible to log your browsing behavior with our technical backend. All the data you use remains anonymous and not connected to your real, public IP address.”

These statements sound convincing, but we would be even more convinced if the provider had followed in the footsteps of some of its competitors and invited outside auditors to confirm their accuracy.

This VPN company doesn’t prohibit P2P connections, “but due to the flow of complaints of copyright holders, the ports used by this type of connection are closed by default on some servers.” You can, however, contact support to get advice on which VPN servers are suitable for P2P.

Support

HideMy.name has user-friendly native apps for Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and Linux devices but can also be configured on routers with the help of detailed manual setup instructions available on the website.

The Android app has been rated by 2,213 users so far, who gave it a median score of 4.5 stars (out of 5). It was installed more than 100,000 times and was last updated on November 3, 2020. The vendor’s iOS app has an even better rating - 4.8 stars, awarded by 707 users. The app was last updated on September 28, 2019.

If you run into any problems with the service, you can scan the provider’s website which contains answers to frequently asked questions, video explanations and instructions, and more. Should the website fail to address your issue, you can contact customer support directly, via email, contact form, or live chat on the website. Whichever you choose, you’ll get a helpful response in no time.

Speed and experience

The provider’s apps are exceptionally simple, but hide a few surprises. The first one is the option to choose what encryption you want to use. You can also opt to use the so-called Chameleon feature, which is recommended when an ISP is filtering your traffic in restrictive regimes such as China. Chameleon allows you “to bypass the Internet restrictions and use a VPN with an additional encryption of all traffic (including the headers).”

Moving on, the app also lets you Enable proxy, choose OpenVPN routing settings, turn on the Prevent DNS leaks feature, set kill switch behavior, choose your favorite servers, and there’s even a built-in speed test to help you choose the best server.

Switching servers requires disconnecting from the active one first, before you can select and connect to a different one. 

Upon our speed tests, Romania did very well, with a 20Mbps download speed on an 83Mbps testing connection. We also tried a server in the United Kingdom, and were equally satisfied with its 17Mbps. 

After testing the servers in Europe, it was time to cross the ocean and try our luck with a server in the East Coast USA, specifically New York. Again, speeds weren’t disappointing - 13Mbps, even though they were slightly lower than in Europe, which makes sense, considering the distance.

Finally, we wanted to see how a more exotic location would behave, so we chose Indonesia - Jawa. We were again pleasantly surprised - the download speed almost reached 9Mbps which is very, very good for a location so far away from our own.

Verdict

HideMy.name gave us an impression of a very serious and dedicated VPN provider, with a team that knows what it’s doing and is so confident in its platform that it is willing to let you test it AND give you your money back if you’re not completely satisfied. It may not yet be on the level of industry giants such as ExpressVPN but it is very, very close to being there, thanks to its excellent speeds, a multitude of affordable subscription options, support for torrenting and geo-restricted content, and more.

• You can sign up to HideMy.name here.

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