Perfect Privacy Review & Test Results 2017

Item: Perfect Privacy Review and Test Results 2017
Rating: 5.0
Author: Sven Taylor

September 21, 2017 By Sven Taylor

Perfect Privacy Review and Test Results 2017

Performance
Features
Support
Value

5.0

Review of:

Perfect Privacy

After testing out many different VPN services, Perfect Privacy has risen to the top of the list and is currently the top recommendation for 2017. You may have never heard of Perfect Privacy because they largely ignore marketing and instead focus on providing a high quality, privacy-focused VPN for their customers. And unlike all the new VPNs flooding onto the market, Perfect Privacy has been around since 2008 offering a safe, reliable, no-logs VPN service.

Their VPN network is composed entirely of dedicated premium servers that provide you with exceptionally fast speeds, great reliability and plenty of bandwidth at all times (you can see real-time server bandwidth here). For features they offer multi-hop VPN chains, advanced firewall configuration options (DNS and IP leak protection), port forwarding, Socks5 and Squid proxies, obfuscation features to defeat VPN blocking, and a powerful TrackStop feature to block tracking, advertising, and malware domains. (See their full list of features here.)

And while the price is on the higher end of the spectrum, Perfect Privacy provides you with many unique and powerful features to protect your privacy, as well as an unlimited number of device connections.

+ Pros

Very fast and reliable
Unlimited number of device connections
Multi-hop VPN chains, up to 4 servers (self-configurable)
100% no logs with no restrictions (a true no logs policy)
Obfuscation features (Stealth VPN)
Dedicated premium servers (no virtual servers)
Full IPv6 support (provides both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses)
Customizable firewall/port-forwarding options
Excellent reputation and over 9 years experience
TrackStop advertisement, tracking, and malware blocker

– Cons

Higher price
Full VPN Manager client not available on Mac OS (but other installation options available)

Connections
Unlimited

Price
$9.75
(€8.95)

Jurisdiction
Switzerland

Privacy Tests
Passed all tests.

Visit Perfect Privacy >>

Pricing and refund policy

When you examine the pricing options, you’ll see that Perfect Privacy is on the higher end of the scale.

But before you get alarmed, consider what you’re actually getting for your money (the true value). Regarding the price (value), Perfect Privacy offers three unique advantages over most VPNs:

Your subscription gives you an unlimited number of connections – whereas most VPN services limit the connections to between three and six. This allows you to protect all your different devices with only one subscription.
Included in your VPN subscription is a very powerful and customizable advertisement, tracking, and malware blocker, which is called TrackStop. This filter will block thousands of different harmful domains at the VPN server level, and it will protect every single device that connects to the VPN network (no need for browser extensions or plugins).
With their VPN Manager client (available for Windows and Linux) you can create a multi-hop chain of VPN servers (up to 4), which provides you with the absolute highest level of anonymity. This multi-hop cascading feature is important for anyone serious about online anonymity – especially since VPN servers can be monitored (discussed here).

Perfect Privacy offers lots of different payment options.

Aside from PayPal and major credit cards, you can also pay with Bitcoin and more than 60 different payment options through Paymentwall. You can even send cash in an envelope to their accounting department in Latvia if you want a more anonymous payment option (I’ve never seen a VPN offer that!).

Refund Policy – Perfect Privacy offers a full 7 day money-back guarantee, without any tricks or bandwidth clauses. This allows you to test everything out. You can find all the details on the website.

Company information and jurisdiction

Unlike all the new and unestablished VPNs currently flooding the market, Perfect Privacy has been offering premium privacy solutions since 2008.

According to the website, the parent company is Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company, based in Zug, Switzerland – an excellent legal and privacy-friendly jurisdiction.

The “Technical Implementation” part of the company is based in Panama under the name “Webinvest International SA.” This is also good because Panama is a solid choice for privacy.

This legal/corporate setup, plus a strong zero logs policy, is a great combination for protecting customer privacy and data.

Platforms and applications

The unlimited number of connections, plus support for all different devices and platforms, allows you to use your VPN subscription with everything (no restrictions).

However, the full Perfect Privacy VPN Manager application is only offered for Windows and Linux operating systems. Overall this won’t make much difference, unless you’re looking to use multi-hop chains VPN chains on other devices. (One alternative offering multi-hop chains on nearly all platforms is ZorroVPN – see the ZorroVPN review.)

Here are the different ways to use Perfect Privacy on non-Windows devices:

Mac OS X: Tunnelblick, Viscosity, or IPSec IKEv2, which will run perfectly on your Mac OS without any extra software (automatic configuration).
- Note: In my testing, the beta version of VPN Manager worked very well. But for simplicity, the IPSec IKEv2 is hard to beat, because it integrates perfectly with Mac and iOS devices.
Android: IPSec (automatic configuration), PPTP (automatic configuration) or OpenVPN (with the OpenVPN for Android app)
iOS: IPSec IKEv2 (automatic configuration) or OpenVPN Connect application for OpenVPN protocol

You can also install the VPN software on your router to protect all of your devices and secure your entire network. See the VPN routers guide for details.

This is a good strategy for extending the benefits of a VPN to all your household devices, without having to download/configure software.

Perfect Privacy is a great VPN for a router because you can activate the TrackStop filter, which protects all devices from malicious tracking and advertising domains (we’ll cover this more below).

Perfect Privacy features

The Perfect Privacy VPN Manager application offers more features than any other VPN I’ve tested or reviewed.

It may not be the flashiest design, but it is a powerful privacy tool.

To optimize speed and connect to the closest server, you can run a real-time ping test, and then rank order the servers by the fastest ping. Real-time bandwidth for every server is also displayed right in the application (available bandwidth is excellent).

best vpn for windows — The Perfect Privacy VPN Manager offers you a highly customizable and powerful VPN application.

Perfect Privacy is a great example of a server network that is optimized for speed and reliability with plenty of available bandwidth at all times. You can check out the bandwidth that is available on Perfect Privacy server right now here.

From the Settings tab you can configure different startup options and features. The VPN Manager gives you complete control over the advanced firewall and DNS leak protection features (see the full explanation of these features here).

vpn perfect privacy — Perfect Privacy gives you maximum control over how you want your VPN to function.

The firewall settings act as a built-in kill switch, which will block your traffic in case the VPN connection drops. This means all your internet traffic will be forced through the VPN, which protects your privacy and security.

Stealth VPN and proxy features

Perfect Privacy has also recently added a stealth VPN (obfuscation) feature to defeat censorship and VPN blocking. This feature masks VPN packets to look like normal HTTPS traffic, thereby concealing your use of a VPN and getting around blocks.

This is a key feature in restrictive countries, such as China, Saudi Arabia, and other high-censorship countries. Additionally, this can be used with schools, universities, or company networks where VPNs are routinely blocked.

Multi-hop VPN chain for maximum privacy

One unique feature of Perfect Privacy is the “multi-hop cascade” option. Perfect Privacy’s premium server network allows you to create a multi-hop VPN chain using up to four VPN servers at the same time. This offers you a very high level of online anonymity with each consecutive hop.

Why use a multi-hop VPN cascade?

Even if a VPN service doesn’t keep logs and works hard to protect user privacy, VPN servers can still be monitored for incoming/outgoing traffic by external authorities or third parties.

A VPN chain gives you multiple layers of encrypted protection. With every “hop” your data is re-encrypted and masked with a new IP address and location.

To enable the multi-hop feature with Perfect Privacy, simply select the cascading option within Settings and then choose how many “hops” you want to have (up to 4).

From there, you can begin selecting the different VPN cascade servers from the main window, one at a time. The order of the cascade will be shown by the numbers on the far left (1-4).

multi-hop vpn chains-4 — Creating a self-configurable multi-hop VPN chain is very easy with Perfect Privacy’s VPN Manager app.

These advanced privacy features are slightly more complex to use, but they offer you a very high level of online anonymity and privacy protection if you want it.

Block ads, tracking, and malware with TrackStop

Another advantage of Perfect Privacy is the built-in advertisement, tracking, and malware blocker, which is called TrackStop. Using a VPN with an ad blocker is a smart choice with the growing dangers of malvertising and tracking.

Ads can now affect many devices, even if you don’t click anything:

Tracking – Think of every ad as a digital surveillance camera, quietly recording your browsing history, keystrokes, and page views.
Malware – Malware can infect your device whether you click the ad or not. For example, malware hidden in the pixels of an image can infect your device in seconds when a website loads (this is even happening to major websites, including the New York Times and BBC).
Ransomware – Another form of malware, ransomware is a growing problem whereby your entire device will be locked up or encrypted, and then held as “ransom” unless you pay some hacker for the decryption key (which may or may not work). This is affecting all devices from computers to tablets, phones, and even smart TVs.

The only solution is to block ads on all your devices.

annoying-ads-trackers — Say goodbye to ads, trackers, malware, and other click-bait spam.

Perfect Privacy’s TrackStop feature is a powerful solution to this problem.

TrackStop will protect every device that connects to the VPN – without having to install separate ad-blocking software.

You can activate the following filters directly in your membership dashboard:

Tracking and Advertisement filter: block over 30,000 tracking and ad domains
Malware filter: block over 45,000 known malware domains
Phishing filter: block over 20,000 phishing domains
Facebook filter: block Facebook domains and their data tracking software
Google filter: block Google domains (over 400 different domains)
Social Media filter: block various social media domains

The importance of a good ad blocker cannot be overstated. This powerful feature is yet another factor that distinguishes Perfect Privacy from other VPNs.

TrackStop can also be used on a router (through the VPN), which will block ads, tracking, malware, phishing, and ransomware domains on every device that’s connected to your home network. See this guide for step-by-step instructions:

Ad Blocker on a Router with a VPN (Perfect Privacy)

And if you want to minimize the hassle, you can get a router that is preconfigured to work with Perfect Privacy from Flashrouters. (See the available Perfect Privacy routers here.)

Server network: quality over quantity

While most VPNs emphasize server quantity (how many locations), the most important factor when examining a server network is quality.

Perfect Privacy puts the highest emphasis on quality by using only dedicated premium servers. Using dedicated premium servers is more expensive than cheap virtual servers (what many VPNs use), which contributes to the higher cost of the VPN. But dedicated premium servers offer many important advantages:

More security – low-quality virtual (rental) servers are often logged by the data center (host) even when the VPN is claiming to be a “no logs” service.
More speed – you can expect better speeds and better bandwidth on dedicated premium servers.
More reliability – Better bandwidth also means better reliability across the network (no dropped connections).

Perfect Privacy does not have the largest server network, but they still offer a good selection of premium servers around the world.

Another important consideration for server speed and reliability is the users-per-server ratio.

Many VPNs have overloaded servers (see NordVPN review), which results in slow speeds, dropped connections, and overall poor performance.

Most VPNs won’t have bandwidth that looks this good:

perfect privacy speeds — You won’t find a server status page on the websites of most VPN providers. Why? Because it wouldn’t look this good (and many VPNs overload their servers).

To provide additional protections for customer privacy, all of Perfect Privacy’s servers run in a RAM disk mode. This protects customer data if anything were to ever happen to the servers. If the power goes, all data is gone (nothing is stored – no logs).

Advantages of the Perfect Privacy server network:

Extremely high bandwidth/speed (up to 1,000 Mbps bandwidth)
Absolutely no leaks (IP, DNS, WebRTC)
IPv6 support (you get both an IPv4 and IPv6 address)
Excellent users-per-server ratio
Good server selection in 20+ countries
RAM disk mode and only premium dedicated servers in use (no virtual servers)

Cross-platform testing results

Here are the results from testing Perfect Privacy on a variety of different platforms:

Windows with VPN Manager Application: The Perfect Privacy Windows client worked well when testing out the software and features. Perfect Privacy supports Windows Vista/7/8/10. You can switch between using OpenVPN or IPSec protocols, cascade with up to 4 different VPN servers, and enjoy fast speeds and reliability across the server network.

Mac OS and iOS with IPSec/IKEv2 (automatic configuration): The built-in software on Mac OS and iOS utilizes the IPSec/IKEv2 encryption protocol, which is considered very secure. You can download the configuration files for the specific Perfect Privacy VPN servers directly onto your Mac or iOS Network Preferences area. By selecting a specific server and enabling the “Connect on demand” feature, all internet traffic will be forced over the VPN connection. This provides a 100% leak proof, very secure VPN setup for Mac or iOS users.

Mac OS with Tunnelblick (OpenVPN): The Tunnelblick OpenVPN software option worked well in my testing. Even still, I recommend the IPSec/IKEv2 option because it’s simpler and easy to use, with automatic connection.

Mac OS with VPN Manager BETA: With the Beta version of VPN Manager, you don’t quite have all the features/options that the Windows client has. That being said, the beta version of VPN Manager still worked well in my testing.

Speed

Perfect Privacy offers you excellent speeds, mainly due to their high-quality servers and high bandwidth. Of course there are many factors affecting speed – discussed here.

But if speed is your top consideration for streaming, torrenting, or other activities, then Perfect Privacy is one of the best options available.

Speed results – All of the servers I tested throughout Europe (my geographical location) were very fast, only reducing my benchmark speed by about 1-2 Mbps.

I tested servers in the United States and Asia too, and the results were also fast and reliable (but due to the distance between me and the VPN server, I experienced slightly slower speeds than with nearby servers).

Zero logs, zero restrictions

When it comes to protecting customer privacy, Perfect Privacy is tough to beat.

They keep absolutely no logs and do not enforce any restrictions whatsoever, in terms of bandwidth or number of connections. They clearly state their logging policy on their website:

No logging of any user specific data or activity. No data is kept. We do not monitor, review, log or store your communication/connection data.

On none of our servers are any logs which would enable a de-anonymization.

Their policies have also passed the test when Dutch authorities seized two of their servers in Rotterdam last year. Their no log policies and premium servers (always running in RAM disk mode) ensured no customer data was compromised.

Important note: There are many VPNs right now that are falsely claiming to be “no logs” when they are in fact collecting customer data. (See the following two examples: ExpressVPN review and also the PureVPN review.)

Privacy and security test results

As with all VPNs reviewed on this website, I thoroughly tested the Perfect Privacy on Windows, Mac OS, and iOS (iPhone) for:

IP address leaks (both IPv4 and IPv6)
DNS leaks
WebRTC leaks
Kill switch protection
Features (do the privacy and security features work as advertised)

Results: Everything passed without any leaks or problems to report.

Here are the results when connected to a Netherlands VPN server. Notice IPv4, IPv6, and DNS addresses are all being supplied by the VPN server (no third parties):

perfect-privacy-leak-test — Perfect Privacy is one of the few VPNs offering full IPv6 support across their server network.

Testing a Perfect Privacy server in the United States:

For this Perfect Privacy review I also tested servers throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. No problems to report.

Results for Windows, Mac OS, and iOS:

No IP leaks
No WebRTC leaks
No DNS leaks
Kill switch and firewall features worked perfectly

Perfect Privacy also has a warrant canary on their website – see here. This page keeps people updated on any government actions that may affect user privacy, such as warrants, court orders, gag orders, or other law enforcement action.

Most VPNs do not provide this information, as doing so would be illegal in the United States and many other countries. Here is further clarification from their website:

Note that Perfect Privacy is based in Switzerland we are not subject to US based laws. Furthermore all Perfect Privacy employees are located in countries where there are no laws that would prevent us from disclosing any kind of incident with full transparency. This warrant canary is purely in the interest of transparency and accountability.

This is another reason why jurisdiction is important when choosing a VPN service.

Support

Perfect Privacy has excellent support with a variety of different options:

In my experience, the Perfect Privacy email support has always been fast and professional.
There is also an active user forum on their website, where you can find announcements and answers to many questions (although the most active part of the forum is in German).

Perfect Privacy review conclusion: Highly Recommended

Perfect Privacy earned a perfect 5 out of 5 rating. While it is on the higher end of the price spectrum, it still offers an excellent value when you consider the premium server network, speed, reliability, and all of the privacy and security features.

Here’s the final breakdown for Perfect Privacy: