WiTopia is headquartered in Reston, VA. The company offers a slick client, a good website and plenty of endorsements from big names in the press and tech world. In testing, however, their network just didn’t seem that impressive, and was slow compared to what other providers offer.
WiTopia offers both a VPN service as well as email encryption. Their vpn product is called personalVPN.
Pricing & Plans
WiTopia’s personalVPN service has 3 plans: Basic, Pro and Premier. Pricing is a s follows:
- personalVPN Basic
- 5 simultaneous connections
- PPTP, L2TP/ IPSec, Ikev1
- personalVPN Pro
- Best for censored countries
- 5 simultaneous connections
- PPTP, L2TP/IPsec, IPsec IKEV1
- Optimized Super-Fast IPsec w/IKEv2
- Enhanced & Customizable OpenVPN (65,000 ports, TCP/UDP, Encryption Level, port randomization)
- Unique-per-User 4096-bit certificate (not a shared one like other providers)
- 256-bit Military-Grade AES Encryption
- Fully Customizable Connection Profiles
- Stealth Modes (Obfuscates VPN traffic to avoid Blocking & Censorship)
- personalVPN Premier
- All personalVPN Pro features plus:
- 8 simultaneous connections
- Add your own VPN Router:
- Easily share your VPN throughout your home or office!
- Any device w/ethernet or Wi-Fi can use your VPN. Smart TVs, Gaming Consoles, you name it!
- Exclusive VPN Router Setup Tools.
- All personalVPN Pro features plus:
Plans can be paid via credit cards or PayPal
Free Trial/ Money-back Guarantee
All personalVPN plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee. There is no trial version.
Privacy & Anonymity
WiTopia says that they don’t keep logs, but then goes on to say that they keep data that can be matched back to users. They say they keep this data to monitor for abuse and, if they find something, they’ll terminate the user’s service and “take further action, if necessary.”
Torrent Policy
The language in the FAQ is unclear, but this service doesn’t appear to allow torrents. They don’t say they specifically prohibit it, but they do offer the following: “ if your reason for using the VPN is to download or upload files that contain copyrighted content without the owner’s permission, please don’t do it over our network.”
Customer Support
We got to try out WiTopia’s customer support due to their client not installing correctly. They were responsive and helpful, though their suggestion didn’t work. They offered using a manual connection as a substitute but, after working with the client for a while, we got it to start up.
Product Testing
WiTopia does have a very nice client. It’s laid out in a way that makes it easy to find what you need. It’s not as feature rich as some of their competitor’s offerings but, overall, they did a very good job building it.
VPN Server Locations
WiTopia has servers across different regions: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Africa and South Africa.
Countries Supported:
Speed Test
This is where, despite their very good customer service and well-designed client, WiTopia failed to deliver. We used their client to select the closest server to Albuquerque and got Phoenix. The connection dropped our Internet speed from over 40Mbps to 7.25Mbps. The performance didn’t improve in retesting.
IPCheck and DNSLeak Test
Our IP address and DNS server addresses were concealed using this service.
Feature Summary
- PPTP, L2TP, OpenVPN
- Windows, Mac client
- Pro package option with more protocols
- Money-back guarantee
- No monitoring or logging
Additional Bonus Features
In locations where VPNs may be aggressively blocked, our Pro and Premier service levels include “Stealth Modes” that can make VPN traffic look like ordinary web traffic.
We Liked
- Good customer service
- Well-designed client
Areas for Improvement
The performance really wasn’t there with this provider. The network was too slow to make them competitive.
Conclusion
WiTopia definitely has an attractive brand. Their client is good, their site is easy to use and their tech support is responsive and helpful. Testing their network, however, revealed that their speed is lower than it should be. The fact that torrenting on this service is really not an option makes WiTopia less attractive, as well. Our preferred providers offer better service, sometimes for less money.
My Witopia VPN stopped working and the support staff Shirin couldn’t help and the company didn’t want to refund the money. Their software and customer service sucks. I am using another VPN now which actually works!
I had the same problem than Gregory a year ago…
On Saturday January 14th Witopia made major changes in their system. I was unable to use the system for three days. Their online chat support service is worthless. They finally told me after three days that I needed to download new software. There was n notice of this or anything or their website to that affect. I have downloaded their new client software and made my connection to their gateways. HOWEVER the connection constantly disconnects leaving me exposed on the internet AND IT DOES NOT NOTIFY ME OF THE DISCONNECT AS THE SYSTEM USED TO. Their service has gone to hell in a matter of days and it appears there is no relief in site. I highly recommend that anyone stay away from Wipotia until they have demonstrated that they have improved the service and customer support. Chuck
I had WiTopia for 2 years without problems. However, the Chinese gov’t. has bombarded them lately, and my connection is irregular, just like my constitution! There support desk has been helpful, though I haven’t been able to solve the problem!
Witopia is a good competitive product since most are unacceptable and useless.
Pros: cost, servers, software, real time help, the best I’ve found yet (but looking for much better)
Cons: service shuts off and PALE BLUE AND PALE GREY ICONS DO NOT INDICATE ANYTHING (bright green and red desktop icons are standard human factor engineering), real time help just smarts off and cannot do anything but tell you to do their job and contact people without even giving an address or phone number (or do your own research to help yourself!), currently looking for a better vpn with better help support (although it’s the best I’ve found yet)