In spite of the widespread surveillance enacted by the NSA, the US still doesn’t have any mandatory data retention laws. IPVanish takes full advantage of this fact, offering one of the best VPN services on the market filled with interesting features and practices.
Note that the US government can still obtain data from providers of remote computing services and electronic communications under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) enacted in 1986. This, however, can be done only with a court order or an administrative subpoena, depending on the information requested. The SCA, as the name implies, can only be administered to cases where companies actually store data. If a VPN practices a strict no-logging policy, there’s nothing the government can do to obtain your personal info.
P2P File Sharing
The possibility of P2P computing is the prerequisite for any torrent-related activity. Although IPVanish warns its users to follow the law at all times, it allows P2P transfers. The warning is there to keep appearances since the company doesn’t actually have any mechanisms to identify if somebody’s breaking the law.
IPVanish introduced major updated in 2016, including Socks5 proxy service. It’s a lightning-speed cluster stationed in the Netherlands, which we see as a wink aimed toward BitTorrent/P2P customers. Well-known torrent clients all have a proxy configuration option, meaning you can alternate your torrent IP address without even connecting to your VPN. With this move, IPVanish joined industry giants like NordVPN, for example.
Prominent BitTorrent clients all have options for proxy configuration, which means you can change your IP address without ever connecting to your VPN. Every respectable VPN service features this option (we’re thinking NordVPN, for example).
Security
IPVanish offers our all-time favorite protocol OpenVPN. You can also opt for PPTP and L2TP protocols, but OpenVPN is a much better choice. Using OpenVPN comes with the industry standard cipher, AES-256. The security package also features SHA-256 authentication and RSA-2048 handshake.
The most important part of the story is its zero-logs policy, which counters the aforementioned act regarding stored data. IPVanish is one of the rare providers without any hidden logs whatsoever, so even if the company was under severe governmental pressure to disclose certain information, there’s nothing to worry about as it doesn’t keep any of your data.
Torrenting On All Servers
This criterion is important because many users get “cheated out” of torrenting with their chosen VPNs. For example, if you subscribe to a service that allows torrenting and later figure out it features only dedicated servers for P2P and none of those are close to your location, you won’t be able to use the VPN for torrenting.
For that reason, we always like to see a company that allows torrenting on all of its servers. IPVanish is one of those VPN providers, making it a complete package for your P2P experience. It currently offers more than 850 servers across 60 countries with over 40k shared IP addresses.