FastestVPN

It’s right in the name - FastestVPN is a VPN service. It claims that high connection speed is its main advantage over competitors. The vendor is Fast Technology Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands (hint: offshore jurisdiction makes it unreachable for intelligence agencies, 5 Eyes/9 Eyes/14 Eyes country alliances in particular).

For users FastestVPN offers servers in 32 countries in North America, Europe and Asia to choose from. Out of 57 available servers, 15 are located in the USA, 3 in Asia (Hong Kong and North Korea), 1 in the Middle East (UAE) and the rest are to be found across Europe. All servers are Unix-based and support P2P connections. Here is how this VPN looks like:

For those familiar with VPN technology, it will be good to know that FastestVPN servers support 7 connection protocols, though customers can choose one of five: PPTP, L2TP, IKEV2, TCP, UDP. The other two - IPSec and OpenConnect addresses - can be accessed via technical support upon request.

Safety measures

In addition to the offshore jurisdiction and diverse connection protocols support, FastestVPN offers a set of other security tools. To be more specific, like most present day services of its kind, FastestVPN encrypts all your traffic by a 256-bit encryption key with the AES algorithm. Also, it provides built-in and automatic malware and ad blockers enabled by default - this is going to be handy to those who use VPN on multiple devices, for sure.

More layers of protection are presented by the built-in NAT Firewall and a Killswitch option. When connecting through a wi-fi router, most of us are unaware that the router itself will also block access to unknown external connections, if it works correctly. But, using a direct cable Internet connection, a device could be more vulnerable.

There is also a risk of a sudden VPN disconnection during traffic transmission (caused by user actions or connectivity problems), and therefore a chance of compromising user privacy. For such cases, Kill Switch is great - you may shut down everything instantly. Note, that this feature is disabled by default, so you have to activate it in settings if required.The last brick is the fact that FastestVPN does not log your Internet sessions. This means that it does not keep the record of your actions while browsing.

For mobile users (Android, iOS) split tunneling option is also available. It means users can set rules for selected apps to allow/disallow routing their traffic via VPN.

Specifications

Installation

FastestVPN is available on a range of platforms (find the list in the apps section of website), Windows, MacOS and Linux, iOS, Android among others. Installer file of the most popular Windows version is roughly 10 Mb and the app takes only 22 Mb of disk space. Unfortunately, this VPN does not contain localizations and is available only in English.

Installation is typical: unpack a ZIP archive and launch the installer file, go through license agreement, installation folder, and click OK. The TAP driver required for FastestVPN will also get installed.

Interface. FastestVPN client has a rather compact design in order not to occupy the screen. First, the client will ask to log in with standard user data (if you bought the product then you will have already registered an account). After that, you will see the main working window - with Connect button, IP address, traffic statistics, et cetera.

Please note, that clicking the Smart Connection button will automatically connect to the closest location with the fastest ping. The closer location to the real one, the quicker ping you’ll get. Yet, it does not mean it is obligatory or the only way. Surely, a user can change location easily - either by going to locations list, or by clicking on the current server name in the main window. We have 32 countries to choose from.

FastestVPN Android app. Its Android VPN app has the interface, similar to the Windows version, but there is a number of peculiar characteristics. Only TCP and UDP protocols are available for mobile connection. Kill Switch is available only for Android 8.0 and higher.

One little but great feature in Android app is the notification line displaying details of current session. This includes download / upload speed.

MacOS. Upon start, you will see a list of available servers and connection protocols they support. The advantage of tray app is the possibility to change location just in two clicks, while the main window provides access to all features and is similar to Windows version. However, after connecting to a certain server, it stays there only during connection times.

Performance tests

Following our testing procedures set for VPN products, we checked how FastestVPN performs in regards to ping, speed, DNS leaks, clear IP addresses, geolocation, etc. We should also underscore, that for each test we ran through each of 32 locations FastestVPN operates in.First up, ping and connection speed tests via Speedtest service. Here are results in full.

As we can see top-3 results for ping were coming from Poland (28 ms), Bulgaria (17 ms) and Romania (30 ms). Check screenshots below.

Best performing servers in terms of download speed were Austria - 353.7 Mbps, Russia - 297.2 Mbps, and Norway - 293.3 Mbps. And lastly, the best upload speeds came from Russia - 146.3 Mbps, Luxembourg - 137.7 Mbps, and Germany - 134.7 Mbps.

Second, the blacklist test. Many tech companies, email service providers for instance, collect lists of malicious IP addresses and then block their access in order to protect customers. To test whether any of FastestVPN addresses are in such blacklists we used IPs retrieved from from the previous test and ran them all through this IP address check service. It checks 70 different databases at once, and results were very good. IPs from 9 locations were absolutely clean (70 out of 70), while the rest of them appeared in 1 or 2 databases.

Then it was time for safety tests, including DNS leak test, WebRTC leak test, HTML5 geolocation test, and using resources Browserleaks.com, Dnsleaktest.com. Starting off with a DNS leak test, indicating if a VPN server would potentially reveal the route of the data or reveal user’s real location. All 29 locations passed successfully.

IP address info is a simple test to check user's location through IP, and at the same time, to see whether a user is really surfing the web under the IP provided by VPN, and if that IP is properly registered in location selected. Geolocation test - to check would VPN give away real location or not.

Overall, FastestVPN passed all tests with good results. 12 out of 29 servers were appropriately set and protected, the rest couldn’t pass with 100% rate, or at all. Check the full report below and note that upon successful completion a server got the “Pass” mark, if the identified location differed from the one selected in VPN, it is listed in the table. It is important to note that none of the servers has revealed the real location, however, displaying the wrong location isn’t ideal too.

Unblocking content

We also decided to check 5 services most common among VPN users: Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Torrent, Disney+ and Tor browser. Previously there were issues with Netflix, but with the new software upgrade it has been fixed: it is accessible through 2 servers - US Florida and a special USA Netflix. Popular BBC player works well, and for Disney+ streaming there is another special server, i.e. US Denver.

As an alternative option, we had set up connection via the Open Connect protocol - for that we had to download OpenConnect-GUI VPN client separately. After that, we had to adjust the connection to FastestVPN British server manually.

Next, we checked Tor browser, or rather, its performance with FastestVPN network. It was stable on all five protocols. For reliability, we also tested via the OpenConnect protocol. Also, as this VPN supports P2P connections, we opened uTorrent, lastly. For the test, we tried to download the file, then pausing the download and switching to different VPN servers. All servers worked with torrent nicely.

For detailed instructions to set up protocols and support materials please visit FastestVPN support page.

Pricing

FastestVPN offers 4 options, 3 of them come with a discount.

1. Monthly subscription costs $10.
2. Annual subscription costs $30 ($2.50 per month would equal to $120).
3. Three-year subscription costs $40 (saving $50 compared to yearly subscription).
4. Five-year subscription is $50.

To each plan, there’s a 15-day money-back guarantee. When your services period expires, we’d recommend to inform FastestVPN team about cancellation, otherwise automatic withdrawal of funds for a next period will happen.

Technical support

You can communicate with FastestVPN technical support in 2 ways: site online chat and email. In our experience, chat response time was about two minutes, which is very good, while email response time was 8 minutes. We asked simple questions, and the answers were informative, quick, so their technical support deserves positive marks.