I have been using AceVPN for three months now and this review is based on this length of time. Before getting into a Virtual Private Network for anonymous internet surfing purposes, you should understand that a VPN will make it more difficult for TLA agencies such as the CiA and Mi5 to spy on you, but a VPN is a single hop proxy, if they want you bad they will most likely have you.
For serious anonymous internet surfing you should use Tor, which unfortunately it is slow for most activities other than posting at bulletin boards.
At the moment there is a 50GB monthly bandwith cap on AceVPN, I think this is a very reasonable amount of bandwith, the average surfer will probably download half that and since P2P programs are not allowed on AceVPN I can hardly see anyone going over the limit.
The Good Stuff
Every time I have emailed AceVPN, around five times, I always got a useful reply in under 24 hours. AceVPN at the time of writing this, has servers in the US, UK and France and claims to be planning new servers at other countries.
One of the USA VPN I was using got blocked by Hulu, a US only TV website, apparently they do not like people from abroad being able to watch their films through a proxy. AceVPN has a secret list of VPNs to access US only sites such as Hulu TV, Pandora radio and Crackle TV, if you email AceVPN support and tell them you want to watch Hulu and they are blocking your proxy, they will send you a new non public configuration file with new servers for the VPN.
AceVPN uses OpenVPN to tunnel the data as opposed to the more unsecure PPTP, and besides Windows, AceVPN also works in Mac, Linux/BSD and the iPhone, any device where you can install OpenVPN should work.
You can choose the UDP or TCP protocol for tunneling. Normally you should choose the UDP protocol, this is que fastest method to download data through the VPN, the TCP protocol is provided because some ISPs and private networks block all UDP traffic to stop certain applications from accessing the internet.
The Bad Stuff
When you sign up for AceVPN they will send you a very hard to remember cryptic password that you can not change, you will need to enter this every time you want to access the VPN, better write it down somewhere, I personally have it saved on a .txt file on my Desktop.
AceVPN has servers in several countries but in order to choose what server you want to connect to you will have to manually edit the OpenVPN config file in Notepad and comment out the servers you want to avoid, there is no control panel to do this.
Torrents and P2P programs are not allowed at AceVPN, even if some users use it, as per terms and conditions this is forbidden.
Conclusion
AceVPN is great value for money and it stops your ISP from logging your internet activities making the life of those who spy on others much more difficult, AceVPN is also one of the cheapest VPN available and the wide choice of servers located in different countries guarantees that if one goes down you can still connect somewhere else.
Be aware that during my time with AceVPN one of their USA servers was seized by the FBI, this was due to a DMCA request according to AceVPN management.
While AceVPN claims not to keep logs, the FBI is known to have great computer forensic facilities and only God knows what kind of personal private data from innocent people they managed to retrieve from that server.
I will be greatly surprised if these professional meddlesome informers resisted the temptation of not looking at other users accounts, I will say it again because people’s lives may be at stake, never forget to use full disk encryption as a security back up. A VPN will make the spooks job more difficult but not impossible, privacy advocates are a high target for TLA, people who have a private life scare the shit out of them, they are not used to that, be ready for an early morning raid from people wanting to know what you do in your spare time, whether you use VPN or you don’t, the Obama deception is here, this is not a joke, the CiA means business, your little VPN will not be enough to stop them, think bigger.
http://www.acevpn.com
UPDATE: As of 01 December 2009, I am having serious problems to watch USA TV with AceVPN (it’s very slow), after various speed tests at http://www.speedtest.net I have detected that their USA servers are very slow at times, in the order of 500Kb/download.
This may change in the future but as for now be warned of this problem. Their French and UK server speed was acceptable.
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