Astrill Review

Astrill offers VPN service that is suitable for both personal usage and business. The VPN provider takes their product very seriously and thus their service is of a really high qulity.

Plans

In this section we will concentrate on their VPN only, even though they also offer a variety of other products. Just like most of other VPNs there are various packages based on the time you are willing to pay for the service with relative cost for a single month decreasing as the subscription length increases. However, unlike most of other VPN providers the smallest package is 3 months and there is no possibility to pay for one month only.

There are 3 main packages: 3 months, 6 months and a year long one. 1 year package without any additional paid features costs $69.95 and is an average price for a VPN. However, you should think about committing to the service as there is no refund available if you are dissatisfied with the VPN. Nevertheless, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial which should be more than enough to determine the quality of the service.

None of the plans have bandwidth limitations and allows the use of torrents or other P2P services.

Servers

Astrill currently has 187 VPN servers in 54 countries and is accessible for everyone around the world. The variety of servers to choose from is always a nice thing when considering your VPN provider as it enables you to access more geographically restricted content. Furthermore, it also shines when you are traveling since you should always be able to find a server that is close to you.

Protocols

Astrill offers one of the widest selection of protocols among VPN providers. Besides the very popular OpenVPN, L2TP and PPTP protocols they also offer less common ones like OpenWeb, SSTP and Cisco IPSec.

However, regardless of the wide array of protocols, the encryption is far from impressive as the strongest encryption used is 256-bit SSL. It may be enough for the majority of VPN users though some are looking for a stronger encryption that may reach up to 2048-bit and is provided by some VPN providers.

Payment Methods

Astrill accepts a variety of payment methods that only few other VPN providers can compete with. You are able to chose from Credit and Devit Cards, eWallets and other payment options like Bitcoin that is widely used to retain anonymity.

Customer Support

Astrill offers contact options via e-mail, live chat, phone and Skype. The live support team provides informative answers instantly and are always happy to help provide information that you are looking for. If these options are not enough the team promises a remote assistance in case it is needed.

Software

Once you have registered you should receive an e-mail that has a link which is used to download the Astrill client. The Operating System you are running is detected by the installer which seems to be a nice little feature that does not require user’s time to be wasted to search for the OS that is being used.

Once the installation is complete a tutorial page opens in your default internet browser. After you log in to the client for the first time you are automatically connected to a VPN server. The client also has many features like ad-blocking or even media recording. However, there is no options to connect to a VPN using older protocols PPTP and L2TP through client. Nevertheless, the tutorials provided on their website are informative and should help any user to set up their systems to use these protocols.

Log Policy

According to the support department, Astrill does not keep any logs and thus is worth considering for people who are concerned for their anonymity. However, they still ask for a lot of personal detail upon registration: full name, phone number, address and e-mail. These personal information requirements may discourage some potential clients from signing up due to the fact that even though they do not keep any logs there is still a handful of personal information that is being kept about the user.

Speeds

After testing connection speeds on various servers we did not notice any significant changes to the download speeds. When using an OpenVPN protocol to the servers that are closest to us we observed download speed losses of about 4% which is a great result for a VPN. What is even more impressive though is that when we tested an OpenWeb protocol we have not noticed any loss of speed at all. The test results left us very pleased with the connection quality and set a perfect example for other VPN providers.

Conclusion

Astrall VPN uses very high standards to make their user experience as pleasant as possible. It reflects in the variety of features, payment options, speeds, etc. they offer. However, we were discouraged to consider Astrill as our main VPN provider since they ask for personal details upon registration and does not offer a strong data encryption. Both of these features are provided by NordVPN which in our eyes is the best provider right now.