Speed:
Compared to its competitors, PrivateVPN has a smaller-sized network of servers, which, in and of itself, could cause issues with connection speeds. If a VPN provider has too few servers, there can be crowding on the servers they do have, slowing your traffic.
Despite its smaller size, PrivateVPN is growing and seems to be able to maintain its fast speeds and consistently dependable connections.
Why are speeds so important? Well, if you are using a virtual private network to unblock geo-restricted streaming content or for gaming or torrenting, your connection speeds will determine whether you can browse, torrent, and watch your shows without annoying delays, buffering, and lag.
For this PrivateVPN review, we put this VPN’s speed to the test. We did a review taking into consideration our baseline download speed, upload speed, and ping. Then, we re-tested our speeds after connecting to PrivateVPN local and long-distance servers.
Our baseline speeds in New York before connecting to a server were:
Download Speed: 69.54 Mbps
Upload Speed: 7.43 Mbps
ping: 39 ms
When we connected to a VPN server in Chicago, these were our new speeds:
Download Speed: 33.91 Mbps
Upload Speed: 5.95 Mbps
Ping: 61 ms
Unfortunately, after trying out a few servers, we realized that there was no way to quickly use PrivateVPN to find the fastest server. The second US server we tried actually gave us better speeds:
Download Speed: 59.54 Mbps
Upload Speed: 6.58 Mbps
Ping: 46 ms
Even when connecting to a long-distance server in Europe, the speeds were still plenty fast for adequate streaming without buffering, which is impressive given that this is on the smaller end of VPNs.