VPN Land review

VPN Land is a Canada-based VPN service that has been active since 2006, but after trying to purchase a subscription with no success, we were left wondering if it is even still operating.

If we were to judge it by the website alone, we’d say it offered a very good service that includes support for torrenting and geo-restricted VOD services, lots of simultaneous connections, user-friendly apps, and more.

However, VPN Land has caused controversy after abruptly discontinuing its lifetime subscriptions and forcing customers to switch to its annual pricing model. It responded extremely impolitely to any complaints, with comments such as: “a ‘lifetime’ account does not mean it will be valid till someone dies. It could be anyones [sic] lifespan – such as a cat, or lifespan of a [sic] hardware”.

If such behavior is enough to make you stay away from the provider, then we suggest checking out some of the solutions in our best VPN guide.

Price

There are three subscription plans in all: the monthly plan at $9.99/month, the 6-month option at $54.99 (equal to $9.17/month) and a 12-month subscription at $100 (equal to $8.33/month), making the provider more expensive than average.

VPN Land used to have a lifetime subscription, but this was removed and replaced by the annual subscription at $100/year. This would’ve been fine had they not demanded lifetime subscribers switch to the annual subscription, leading to accusations of fraudulent practices from many users. What’s worse, complaints made to the customer service were met with incredibly rude responses.

The provider accepts payments made using credit/debit cards, PayPal, WebMoney, Paymentwall, as well as cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum.

A money-back guarantee lasts for 7 days after the purchase, but only if you can prove that the service doesn’t work. So no free trials, no risk-free money-back guarantee and virtually no chance to see if the provider is to your liking.

Under one account, users can connect up to 10 devices at the same time, which is a decent number. However, you may never even get the chance to do this.

Alternatives

Considering the our own experience with the firm, we believe a straightforward (and cheaper) provider is preferable. For instance, ExpressVPN will take almost the same amount of money out of your pocket on a monthly basis but will provide transparent service with some of the best customer support agents we’ve encountered.

Even cheaper, yet very capable, VPN companies include NordVPN, VyprVPN, and finally, Surfshark, whose services you can purchase for less than $2/month.

All of these VPN providers also offer free trials, so you can test out the platforms and see if you like them before making a final decision.

Streaming

VPN Land claims to be able to provide its customers with access to popular streaming services, like Netflix, BBC iPlayer and Hulu,  which are often blocked in certain regions.

About the company

The owner of VPN Land is Blacklogic Inc., which was established in October 2006 in Canada.

VPN Land operates more than 700 servers in over 30 countries around the world, in locations such as China, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, and Singapore.

Privacy and encryption

The provider uses the AES-256-CBC encryption and 4096-bit RSA certificates, along with OpenVPN, SSTP and L2TP/IPSec protocols, to secure your privacy

VPN Land’s servers are P2P-optimized, which means you should b able to share large files via P2P clients in perfect privacy and with no restrictions. However, the provider warns that, should it receive a DMCA copyright infringement notice, “you as a customer will be notified and you as a customer will be legally responsible for your own actions.”

Customers are also told that P2P downloads aren’t permitted through the US VPN servers “under any circumstances” and the company may disable your account if it suspects you’re torrenting through those servers.

The platform’s privacy policy states that no logs are kept on its VPN servers, so it doesn’t know what you do online and doesn’t record your DNS requests. It might see its customers’ real IP addresses in the periodic diagnostic logs, but it claims to not be able to map these IPs to individual users.

VPN Land also states that doesn’t collect any device-related information (device model, your name, email address, Apple ID, Google ID, phone advertiser ID, phone number, or mobile operator).

However, these claims have not been verified by an independent auditor.

Support

VPN Land has apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Apparently, it can also be enabled on other platforms – such as Linux or VPN routers – using third-party apps and/or manual installation instructions.

The vendor’s iOS app has a rating of 3.7 (out of 5) but has only been rated by 3 users so far. The Android app, meanwhile, has been installed 10,000+ times, was last updated on January 20 and has the same rating.

Setting up the apps is very simple, but if you do need help or want to install the service on a platform for which the vendor does not have a native app, you can find assistance on the website.

This assistance is available in the form of manual installation guides, FAQs, and customer support that is allegedly available 24/7 via email and ticket. However, none of our tickets or emails were ever answered.

Speed and experience

VPN Land still hasn’t activated our account so we weren’t able to test speeds first-hand. According to existing users, download speeds are average or below-average.

Verdict

In theory, VPN Land has some good qualities to offer – it unblocks Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and other geo-restricted streaming channels, supports torrenting, and also up to 10 simultaneous connections. However, this is not the case in practice.

The main reason we’re giving this provider such a poor rating is due to its unprofessional handling of lifetime subscription holders. These customers were forced to pay again for the annual subscription and treated extremely unpleasantly by customer support.

We also observed that the provider’s website was very slow and had no security certificate, and our account was never activated. 

To avoid all these issues – and at roughly the same price – you should instead give an alternative like ExpressVPN a go.