How to setup Hide.me VPN
Features
hide.me (parent company eVenture Ltd) is a VPN based in Malaysia with a large German presence as this was their initial market, but now they have gone global so nearly everything is available in English. Their German forum has a bit more information than the English one and you’ll need an online translator to understand it (unless you speak German of course).
They have a large number of protocols you can use, great speeds and superb security. They also have upwards of 115 servers in 23 countries worldwide – most of which allow P2P and as mentioned you can be connected with up to five devices.
Security & Privacy
Following an audit by Leon Juranic of Defense Code Ltd., hide.me are now certified completely log-free. Even free users are no longer subject to data transfer logs. What’s more, hide.me has recently begun publishing a transparency report of requests by authorities for information on users of their service; as they say on their website, their standard response to such requests is to state that, as they keep no logs, they are unable to provide any such information. As they are based in Malaysia, they are also outside both EU and US jurisdiction, and they say they will move locations if unlikely circumstances forced them to.
They have a great amount of protocols: as well as PPTP, L2TP, SSTP, OpenVPN, IKEv1 and IKEv2, they’ve recently added SoftEther support too. This is great as it allows you to choose the best protocol for speed and security – naturally we’d recommend OpenVPN or IKEv2 (you can read more about these here). For these, they use the very secure AES 256bit encryption. They also support SOCKS proxy; you can read more about this here.
Another reason why they are amazing is that they are amongst a very few providers who offer dynamic port forwarding, which security wise is a more optimal solution than strategically exposing ports of the customer’s device, and this is exceptionally easy to set up.
The website
The hide.me website is really well designed with fluid elements and easy navigation. The set-up guides are easy to find and follow making it easy to get connected. Unfortunately as mentioned below setting up multiple devices is a bit of a hassle.
Support
hide.me’s primary support is via a contact form. As with all other providers it was easy to use. We received replies exceptionally quickly, even at the weekends and their support was very informative and helpful.
hide.me also has a community page where the Admins and developers are very active. This is great in case you have a general question which would interest all the users of the service, and also because your problem might have also been asked and solved. While it’s easy to browse, unfortunately you can’t use your normal hide.me account to sign in to the community and have to create another account – this is done for security reasons.
The Process
Signing Up
Due to hide.me’s high attention to security, it’s no surprise that all you need in order to register is an email address. Once you activate your account you will only be asked to enter a username and nothing more.
Even during payment your privacy is protected. During the payment process you’re assigned a unique ID which is then deleted meaning your payment can’t be tracked to a specific account. As mentioned it is also possible to pay by Bitcoin.
The Windows VPN client
While using the hide.me client was a pleasurable experience overall, we had one big issue with it: it didn’t support OpenVPN. While they do support OpenVPN and have setup guides for it, we’d prefer it if it was built into their client.
On the bright side, simple connections can be run without needing administrator privileges so more people on your computer can use it. With administrator privileges you can also benefit from a Kill Switch, IP leak protection and DNS leak protection. There’s also a ‘fallback protocol’ to automatically reconfigure your connection settings if a connection fails the first time around. Alongside this you can choose between an PPTP, SSTP, IKEv2 connection. Of these we’d recommend using the IKEv2 connection as not only is it fast and secure but it’s also resilient to network changes (e.g. if you’re on the move).
With so many protocols to choose from, we found that hide.me provides you with truthful recommendations on which protocols to use, their relative pros and cons and also how to set it up – so you can always be securely connected.
Performance (Speed, DNS and IP Test)
As you can see from the below table the speeds were all great, whether we were using OpenVPN or IKEv2. The DNS Leak test all came back clear (OpenDNS), however there were some problems with the IP checks. When connected to one of their NL servers our address appeared to be in Germany according to some databases but in NL according to others, the DNS leaks were in NL from all test. We questioned them about this and we got the following reply:
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| Pure Internet Speed | IKEv2 Speed | OpenVPN Speed |
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