How's it going everybody and welcome to the full review of the VPN with probably the best name on the market hidemyass or for short HMA it's one of the most popular services out there and they claim they can hide your ear even Kim Kardashian's.
Well just like every other VPN review on the channel I put them to the test in the following five
categories each rated by importance for a total score out of 5-4 stars being the
recommending tech proved mark.
Let's kick off with security at 40 percent HMAS jurisdiction is based in the UK which is in the five eyes of the 14 eyes program definitely a concern for some of you out there.
There are logs they store your username timestamps bandwidth your actual IP address and the IP address of the VPN server you connect to not a great logging policy they do own a majority of their DNS servers.
But they use Open DNS for some which is not good for your privacy since Open DNS is known to collect and sell data HMA offers Open VPN IPSec l2tp and PPTP protocols the most secure encryption being AES-256 encryptionThere is no system-wide kill switch only a kill switch for predetermined programs a big concern for any security-minded individuals HMA changed my IP address and it passed the Heights or DNS leak,
Test and the DNS leak test calms DNS leak test lastly.
I do have to mention that a hacker got caught from the FBI after hidemyass handed over the users information you do have to remember that they do keep logs and if the FBI is asking for logs from any company they are going to hand them over if this bugs you look for a service with an O log policy,after adding up all the pros and cons HMA came out with two and a half stars on security itself is actually pretty strong on hidemyass.
Where they really fell off was in privacy their extensive use of logs their jurisdiction and also their previous track record makes it a not very private option
Next up is speed worth 20 percent HMA had a server very close to me which offered no drop-off in my ping, however, my download speeds decreased on average by a little over 18 percent and uploads by almost seven percent.
These speeds are far from great but they're not awful from my testing they scored almost exactly the same as expression giving hidemyass a score of three stars out of five.
Let's move on to the settings and customization for a mere five percent HMA is the most minimal least customizable program I have yet to ever review. They offer an auto-start and connect when Windows boots up basic Wi-Fi customization a TCP option and a manual kill switch for individual programs and that's it.
Now I'm gonna discuss the lack of customization later on in the post because it's not necessarily a bad thing for every user out there however when it comes to raw customization they're gonna score one and a half out of five stars because they offer such a small selection now let's discuss their usage worth 15% the windows program is very minimal easy to use and gets the job done simply there's really not much more to say, however,
a complaint I have is that you can't resize the window which sucks on a 4k monitor I won't deduct for that but please fix this it's gonna drive anyone over 40 completely insane for Linux they do have a command-line interface which I guess it's better than managing hundreds of profiles using Open VPN but it's still not the greatest experience I do however appreciate the CLI effort.
The Android app is surprisingly even more minimal than the Windows client offering a whopping three settings.
One of them is an IP shuffle though something actually pretty useful and makes me wonder why it's not on any of their other clients also I am NOT happy the data collection settings are enabled by default without prompting you.
I'd recommend you, privacy-oriented users, immediately disabling these iOS really brings at home offering exactly one setting and the same to data collection settings which I'd recommend you disable torrenting, on the other hand, is kind of a dicey topic there seems to be some censorship towards what you can download which is a very valid concern.
But there is nothing of fish stating that they blocked torrents or even enough evidence for me to assume they do so I can't officially mark off for this but do keep in mind that there are quite a few users who have come out saying that their torrents have been throttled or cut out altogether to summarize usage normally.
I subtract one star for offering no Linux client however, HMA does offer partial Linux support with their CLI program so I'm going to subtract half a star for no Linux support they really did take minimalism to an absolute extreme as much as I don't like it.
I'm sure tons of users out there love it four and a half out of five stars lastly stability at 20% I used it for a few days and had absolutely no issues no bugs no crashes no leaks I guess that data collection is definitely paying off 5 out of 5 stars.
All right before I give you guys the final calculated score there are a few more things I want to mention about hidemyass that I think are important to share they allow up to 5 simultaneous devices a pretty standard amount there are at least 870 servers and about 190 countries
as of today making it one of if not the largest country selection of any VPN I've reviewed on the channel price-wise they are not cheap the cheapest plan is $6.99 per month for a 12-month plan.I did find this Firefox add-on but it's from 2015 and there is no mention of it on their website so I'd stay well away from this and lastly they offer a guaranteed 30-day money-back policy yeah that's great!
no there's a giant asterisk as long as you haven't gone over ten gigabytes of data usage or 100 sessions both of which can probably easily be done in a week very sketchy refund policy indeed so adding up everything HMA ended up scoring 3.35 which rounds up to 3.4 out of 5
So it is tech approved
my thoughts are that the server is geared towards the absolute simple oriented users who want
the easiest most minimal experience out there for a VPN.