VPNTunnel review

VPNTunnel is a Seychelles-based provider of anonymity services that, although not offering as many servers as some of its competitors, nevertheless succeeds in ensuring fairly good performance. 

If you’re running a Mac device, you won’t find it very user-friendly since you’ll need to install third-party software and manually set up VPNTunnel’s servers, but once it’s up and running, it will show you all it can do. 

While this VPN service is pretty good, even better and more user-friendly VPN providers can be discovered among the best VPN services.

Price

This vendor’s services are available through three subscription lengths - 1-month at $9.99/month, 3-month at $6.66/month (billed $19.98 every three months), and 12-month at $2.99/month (billed $35.88 annually).

The annual package is on the cheaper side of the industry, although there certainly are less expensive VPNs out there. Accepted payment methods include credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club), Mint, Sofort, PayPal, GlobalPayments, WebMoney, Perfect Money, as well as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, and more, if you prefer to stay anonymous while paying.

There is no free trial, but there’s a 7-day money-back guarantee, although the small print says that “the full or partial refund can be performed only at VPNTunnel.com’s own discretion taking into consideration all reasons of such User’s wish.”

Your VPN subscription enables you to have five simultaneous connections, “using any mixture of supported devices and VPN protocols.”

Alternatives

If VPNTunnel isn’t good enough for you, better providers do exist, with qualities that outmatch it. For instance, Surfshark and CyberGhost cost less (while still performing superbly), while ExpressVPN and NordVPN offer far more advanced and richer services. All four feature way more servers and much more responsive customer support. Also, their privacy and no-logging policies leave much less room for different interpretations.

Streaming

One of the most sought-after features a VPN can have is the capability to unblock popular streaming channels that have imposed geographical locks on certain areas. VPNTunnel indeed prides itself with this capability and can unblock BBC iPlayer, Netflix US and UK, Hulu, and more (although not specified), with specialised servers.

About the company

Digging around the website (Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and the Contact page are in German), we managed to find that the VPNTunnel is headquartered in Seychelles.

The provider offers its users access to more than 150 servers scattered across 32 countries. It’s nowhere close to thousands of servers that some of the competitors have, but it just might be enough for an average user.

Privacy and encryption

VPNTunnel supports a wide range of protocols and their combinations, including OpenVPN, PPTP, WireGuard, L2TP, IPsec, and Stunnel+OpenVPN.

You will be able to safely share large files via P2P and torrenting clients, as it states itself that “P2P enabled in many locations (as many as we can) – your peering activity won’t be tracked by private or government agencies”.

The company states that it will never ask you for any personal data, nor will it ever keep any “online activity logs or store private information about individual user activities on our network.” It also adds that it never logs “IP addresses, times or any other details like that. This is always valid for our servers in Sweden.”

Upon reading this, we started to wonder why the policy only mentions Sweden, as it proceeds:

“As regards our servers in Sweden and other countries where we keep no traffic logs, it is impossible to provide details that can, for example, connect a specific user to a specific activity at a specific time for the simple reason that we do not store this data. In other words, it is not an issue we have to consider anytime such a request is made.”

Things become a bit clearer (and a bit alarming) in further text:

“For countries where logs have to be kept, we will only ever provide information when legally required to do.”

So logs are indeed kept for the countries where the law requires so, even though VPNTunnel is based in Seychelles, which is all a bit off-putting.

More issues are found buried deeper inside VPNTunnel’s privacy policy, which states that, if VPNTunnel is acquired by a third-party, users’ personal data will be disclosed to this third party, opening some loopholes for anyone willing to exploit them.

Support

VPNTunnel has downloadable native clients for Windows, iOS (rated 4.4 by 39 people, last updated February 22, 2019) and Android (rated 3.7 by 1,400 users, downloaded over 100,000 times, last updated June 10, 2020). However, it doesn’t have apps for any other platforms (like Mac or Linux) for which you’ll have to use third-party software and/or tinker around with your device’s settings which is far from ideal for beginners.

That said, the provider does provide detailed installation guides for various supported platforms on the website’s support section. These platforms include Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Ubuntu, Steam, AppleTV, Amazon Fire TV, Smart TVs, PlayStation, Xbox, Roku, Chromecast, RaspberryPi, Chromebook, and routers.

The support section itself and the FAQ area are pretty detailed and helpful but they can appear a bit overwhelming and disorganized. If you don’t manage to find your answer there, then you can contact the customer support via a chat option on the website, web form, or email. Do note, however, that the customer support isn’t always available and we’re still waiting for a response to a couple of simple questions we asked three days ago via the chat option, but the queries might be organized by importance since we didn’t have an account at that moment.

Speed and experience

The website states that VPNTunnel’s servers are connected to a 10Gbps uplink and that the company is constantly adding the latest hardware to ensure its network is never overloaded. This should guarantee excellent speeds and our testing delivered satisfying results.

Specifically, we first let the app connect us randomly to “Any Country”, and it picked Japan. Despite the distance, we weren’t disappointed by the download speeds, which averaged at 35Mbps on our 45Mbps testing connection. The results were even better when we connected to a server in Czechia, reaching 39Mbps. That said, a server in New Jersey, US, marked as ideal for Netflix, performed slightly worse (but still better than some) - 18Mbps.

Verdict

VPNTunnel will do what it’s supposed to - hide your identity online, unblock Netflix and BBC iPlayer, as well as enable secure torrenting. However, it features only around 150 servers, the customer support seems a bit shoddy, and its privacy policy has a couple of loopholes. 

Considering these shortcomings, an industry leader such as ExpressVPN may be a better choice, especially since its privacy policy is quite clear and transparent, with no room for different interpretations, and the customer support is seconds away at all times.