There isn’t a cash option, but cryptocurrencies at least offer some manner of anonymity since you are paying directly to a cryptocurrency wallet.Īs for the company itself, it is officially based in Hong Kong. It accepts payments using PayPal, credit cards, crypto currencies via Coin Gate, Alipay, gift cards via Paygarden, as well as a number of other specialty payment services.
PureVPN requires an email address and password at sign up, which is standard practice. As usual for a VPN service, PureVPN wants people to sign up for at least a year by making that option the cheapest by far. There is also a six-month plan for $50, or you can pay on a month-to-month basis for $11 per month. If OpenVPN doesn’t work the fallbacks are L2TP and IKEv2. PureVPN’s connections use OpenVPN by default with data encryption handled by AES (either GCM or CBC), data authentication is SHA 1 or SHA256, and the handshake is RSA-2048 with RSA-4096 as a fallback. PureVPN has NAT and non-NAT options for power users.
That way users can still appear to be in a particular country, perhaps to take advantage of local websites, while still using a robust server backed with higher bandwidth.īesides marking virtual locations, PureVPN also marks locations that can be used for P2P file sharing, and a phone icon indicates the server will work with VoIP applications. In 2017, PureVPN told us it used virtual server locations to bypass low-quality infrastructure in developing countries. Each virtual location is tagged as such within the desktop apps, as well as on the server list on the website.
There’s an information page on the company’s website explaining what it’s doing. This is standard practice for PureVPN, and the company is not shy about it. Instead, the servers are somewhere else such as Brazil, Europe, or North America, but using an IP address for the stated country of origin. By virtual locations we mean that PureVPN doesn’t have physical servers in countries such as Argentina, Mauritius, or Turkmenistan.