NordVPN Review

Last week’s court decision where Australian Internet Service Providers were successfully taken to court by Dallas buyers club LLC and forced to disclose the IP addresses of their customers that may have downloaded and shared the Dallas Buyers Club Movie.I’ve received a lot of emails from people asking for advice.
‘i like to download stuff am i going to get in trouble?’
I reply generally saying – we don’t support copyright infringement, having said that.
Websites like the pirate-bay are hotspots for anti-piracy groups.
BestVPNS wrote an article on what VPN is good for Australians. Moving along.
Given all that, i decided to try out a new VPN provider promising something a little different.
This time – NordVPN Let’s get started.

Logging

Nord are based out of Panama and so are not subject to United States laws.
In factPanama does not require any Internet service provider to retain any kind of information.

Upon checking the NordVPN website for their official policy on logs
“We keep no logs” Concise and to the point – nice.
While it’s almost impossible to keep no logs – ie when a user signs up to the service, it’s important to keep for accounting details – the less logs the better and the fact they are based in Panama means they are not going to be dealing with subpoenas from US courts.

Usability and Interface

NordVPN is different from most other VPN Providers that i’ve tried.
The interface is nice and simple enough.

You will notice it doesn’t have the standard ‘Choose a protocol -> OpenVPN, PPTP etc in an obvious place but NordVPN has implemented some other cool methods such as ‘double vpn’ and ‘Tor Over VPN’. Double VPN works by the user connects to the first node where the data is encrypted. Then the encrypted data flows to the second node and gets encrypted again and only then reaches the internet. At the moment Nord have only combination of Austria -> Netherlands nodes available for double VPN.

Tor over VPN is a higher privacy solution when the traffic goes through one of the NordVPN servers, gets encrypted and sent to the Tor network. More information about Tor over VPN.

Conclusion

NordVPN is a good little VPN system, it is only the lower end of the cost spectrum coming in at $4.00 per month with a year package, yet still has a nice selection of server locations. Another plus is that you’re able to use Nord on two devices at the same time, so secure your smartphone and PC. Nord being based out of Panama gives it a huge boost in many peoples eyes ensuring that it’s not subject to US law. I also like that they are trying to do things a little differently with the Tor VPN and double VPN option. Though this will slow your performance down a bit while operating. For me the drawback is that picking between VPN protocols isn’t blatantly easy and there is the possibility for some users may be default get stuck using PPTP – we don’t like PPTP very much.
Though that’s a small issue especially given its the plus sides.
Give NordVPN a try.