I got PureVPN in January for 1 year. It was on special and I needed a VPN for cloud streaming for games. I just used it to start a session then disconnect. Now I’m not using it much because I finally got a capable PC.
On to the gripes. I will talk on the Android, PC and Mac versions. I don’t use the iPhone version so I have nothing to say there.
For reference my internet at home (5G wireless) is 350Mbps download, 50Mbps upload and 25ms ping.
At work I have 75Mbps download, 35Mbps upload and a ping ping of 15ms.
General stuff first
- This VPN suffers from very dirty IPs. If you try to Google Search or try to buy a game on Epic Games or other sites with IP address filtering, you will get captchas. A lot of captchas. It’s really really annoying and wastes your time a lot.
The solution is to get a l dedicated IP but folks here orln Reddit advised against it because apparently their dedicated IPs are slow.
The Windows experience is the worst offender.
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For some reason, the Windows app regularly logs itself out and I have to login again. I’m not sure why it does this. The only other app that does this type of crap on my computers is Epic Games, their login sessions are quite short.
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The Windows app is very slow to open and connect when it does work. It’ll take anywhere between 3 and 5 minutes from clicking on the app icon to it finally connecting. I’ll be looking at loading screens like I’m trying to play a game with 4K assets or something.
My 2 Windows computers are both 9th gen and 12th gen Intel with 16GB of RAM so it’s not that they are slow. -
The Windows app UI is also not very responsive. After I wait like 4 minutes to finally get to the screen where I connect, I can click on the server icon and the app will not react or respond. After 5 or so clicks it then shows that it’s connected.
The Mac app does not have any of these issues. It’s a work issued M2 Max. So I’m not sure what the developers working on the Windows app are doing wrong.
The Android app doesn’t have too many issues, just minor bugs. For example I use the South African servers 80% of the time and only connect to Germany for P2P the rest of the time. But for some reason, the suggested server is always Germany. Should it not be the most used one?
Now I don’t use the VPN as much but there were also frequent disconnections for some reason. I would get disconnected maybe 3 or 4 times a day and sometimes I wouldn’t notice and continue with my web browsing.
So yeah, stay away. I will not be renewing in January. I will likely get something else after doing better research than I did when I got this.