PUREVPN

PureVPN is a commercial VPN service owned by GZ Systems Ltd. Founded in 2007, the company is based in the British Virgin Islands.

PureVPN allows users to select from four categories: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, and File Sharing. The user’s selection then determines which servers through which their traffic will be routed. PureVPN’s 2000 servers are located in 140 countries with 87 of those countries having virtual servers that make the servers seem to be in a different country than where they are actually at. PureVPN requires users to provide their real names to use the service. It stores the day and the Internet service provider through which a user accesses the service but does not store the name of the website or actual time of access.

History

Owned by GZ Systems Limited, PureVPN is a software company that creates cybersecurity apps.  Its mailing address is in Tortola, the British Virgin Islands.PureVPN was co-founded by Uzair Gadit who is based in Pakistan. Founded in 2007, it employs contractors in the United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Pakistan, the British Virgin Islands, and formerly Hong Kong.

Service

PureVPN’s The hhomepage allows users to select from four categories: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, and File Sharing. Each category has a different configuration. Internet Freedom, for example, lets customers select which countries their Internet traffic is going through when trying to bypass the Great Firewall of China. According to Mashable’s Charles Poladian, “many credible reports” indicated that PureVPN was unsuccessful in overcoming China’s Great Firewall. PureVPN allows customers to select what they plan to do such as browsing social media, conducting Voice over IP calls, and streaming videos. It then uses this selection to choose specific servers for customers to send their Internet traffic through. Other configuration options include the transport protocol (the less safe UDP or the more safe but less speedy TCP) and split tunneling (choosing the apps that will direct traffic through the VPN). PureVPN offers users the option to turn on the “VPN Hotspot”, allowing other devices to use the PureVPN hotspot connection.

PureVPN provides desktop clients for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows and mobile clients for Android and iOS. PureVPN can be run at the same time on five sessions. It allocated 200 servers for peer-to-peer file sharing and BitTorrent usage but does not provide any servers for accessing the Tor network.

PureVPN has more than 2,000 servers in over 140 countries. Their servers are in 180 separate locations and in Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America, Europe, North America, and South America. Max Eddy of PC Magazine said PureVPN “offers some of the best geographic diversity I have yet seen among VPN companies” though “not everything is necessarily as it seems”. Eddy found that in 87 of those countries, PureVPN’s servers are virtual servers that merely make the servers seem to be in a different country than where it really is at. PureVPN places virtual servers close to the country they say it is at, which Eddy found problematic for users who want to avoid their data passing through certain countries.