Private WiFi is a VPN service that promises it will activate every time you establish a connection to the internet and will secure you by routing all of your internet traffic through an OpenVPN connection.
Private Wifi is a small company that is fairly new to the VPN world but seems to offer a decent solution.
Pricing & Plans
You can save on signup by using our coupon code which is simply “VPN”. Just enter VPN on the checkout page and you are good to go.
For your money you will get unlimited access to the VPN, from any computer you use that has their software installed. The number of devices you can use per account depends on the plan you choose.
You can pay for Private Wifi via credit card or PayPal.
There are business and corporate level programs available also if you are looking into securing a large network.
Free Trial/ Money-back Guarantee
They do have a 10 day trial account for those on the fence and wanting to check out their service. All that is required to check them out is a good email address.
According to their site, they also offer a money-back guarantee. However, it is unclear what the terms are.
Privacy & Anonymity
Private Wifi takes the privacy of your data seriously. They do maintain a set of logs necessary to manage their servers. However, the only information that is traceable to individual users is the time on and off their network and the number of the total bytes transmitted. They do not monitor or record the sites that you visit nor the contents of any Internet communication.
Provider Logging Policy
Private Wifi does not monitor any of your online communications. So if any government was ever to subpoena their server records, they virtually have no information to give them. They do maintain a set of usage logs, including time on and off our network and total bytes transmitted. This information is necessary to manage their server network, but is of little interest or value to law enforcement. Thus far, they have received no requests from any government for information about their users. If ever they receive such requests, it is their policy to both require a subpoena and to notify users of requests for their information prior to disclosure unless they are prohibited from doing so by statute or court order. Private WiFi supports industry efforts to limit government surveillance to reasonable levels, specifically by being members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Torrent Policy
We found no restrictions regarding torrents on the Private Wifi website. That being said, we are still uncertain if Private Wifi is effective for torrenting.
Customer Support
The Private Wifi site has a very good support page that has an extensive FAQ page, including a quick start guide. If there are questions you need to ask their team, you can send it via their customer support form or feedback form. Please note, however, that their customer support is only available from 8AM to 12AM EST Monday through Friday.
Product Testing
From their “Free Trial” page we selected the 10 day trial and the 4 Mb download went smoothly. After a few minutes we had installed the VPN onto our Windows test machine. According to their website they support all versions of Windows from XP on and Mac with OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard.
Once started the client resides in your taskbar waiting to be activated and once activated it will route all internet traffic through the Private WiFi server’s secure connection to your computer. Wherever you are in the world, it will appear to others that you are in the location of the server you choose to connect to through their temporarily assigned IP address for you.
VPN Server Locations
The single largest weakness of this service is the shortage of server locations. But the ones they do have are in excellent locations. They are in: California, Virginia, and Missouri, in the U.S. With additional servers in the Netherlands, and Singapore.
Open VPN (SSL) is the only protocol they presently support. 128 bit encryption is used for your connection on all of their servers.
Countries Supported:
Speed Test
Minor slow downs can be expected with any VPN connection, it’s how much of a loss that is experienced is where the real test comes in, and we found no significant losses in surfing speeds were experienced except in the cases of large downloads. But, this can be expected from other VPN services as well.
IPCheck and DNSLeak Test
Private Wifi successfully masked our IP address and did not leak our DNS.
Feature Summary
- 256-Bit Encryption
- Compatible with multiple devices: laptops and desktops; Tablets and smartphones
- Multi-platform support: MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android
- Good customer support
- Easy to use
We Liked
- Good speed
- Free Trial and Money-back guarantee
- Clients for different platforms
- Easy to use client
Areas for Improvement
- As a new service we expected them to be a little light on a few facts like the servers. A minor limitation of this service is the single protocol supported. While OpenVPN is indeed a good standard it is not the fastest out there for things like watching netflix overseas.
- After downloading and installing the client we were informed that our computer’s 3 day trial had expired. We knew this to be an error and contacted support through their email. Issues were resolved within 3 hours.
- Shortage of server locations
Conclusion
While they do have their limits and their pricing and available server locations are not as developed as a provider like HMA (HideMyAss) nonetheless their service seems decent and their support staff knowledgeable. The issues we encountered were quickly resolved, and all our other questions were answered.Our recommendation, check out our list of Best VPN Services where you might be able to find other providers with more server locations and / or protocols, etc but either way Private Wifi seems to be trying to put out a good product.
Thank you for reviewing our product.
One correction: We have a slightly different design philosophy about our servers. We list server locations, not individual servers.
Each of our locations has multiple servers and is it our job to be sure that the server capacity is sufficient to meet the demand.
As you indicate in our review, we carefully select each location to get good geographic dispersion.
When a user starts Private WiFi, the system automatically chooses the closest location. Of course, the user can over-ride that and select whichever location they wish.
Within each location, the system selects the specific server based on load balancing considerations.
We feel this is a much simpler way for the system to operate, particularly for average, non-technical users.
I already have an account but I lost my iPad and tried logging in with different device but it say account is expired