VPN Services: HideMyAss Review – Part 1

This is part of the series of reviews on the current solutions that can help our readers to protect their privacy online. This article will discuss HideMyAss’offer.

As of the time of writing, HideMyAss is available for the following platforms:

• Windows XP, Vista and 7: version 2.6.9 that was released on 20^th July 2011
• Mac Os X Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Tiger: version 1.1.7 that was released on November 2010
• Linux: version 1.2 that was released on 04/08/2009

PPTP support

Although most serious VPN now implement openVPN (and HideMyAss also does), it’s always good to check the list of PPTP servers provided. This comes handy when you are considering usning the VPN service with mobile devices (iphone, android, ipads, …) as those devices usually come with a PPTP client natively.

The good thing about HideMyAss is that they provide a great list of PPTP servers throughout different countries: more thant a hundred of USA , 16 Canada , 22 UK , 8 Netherlands,  3 Germany, 1 Estonia, 1 Hungary, 1 Dublin, 2 Portugal, 2 Romania, 1 Russia, 2 Sweden, 1 Ukraine, 2 Singapore,  4 Luxembourg, 1 Lithuania, 1 Latvia, 1 Italy, 1 Turkey, 2 Spain, 2 Australia, 1 Hong Kong, 2 Switzerland, 1 Poland, 1 Serbia,  1 Moldova, 1 Czech Republic, 1 Austria, 1 Panama, 5 Egypt, 1 France,  1 Israel. Not only HideMyAss provide a huge list of PPTP servers, but thay also have detailed documentation for implementing it on Windows (XP, 7), Apple and Android.

Things I liked

Once the HideMyAss VPN client is launched, the country selection is definitely a great feature. You can just select on a Google map which country you want to go to. For people who don’t really want to worry about learning geography, this is definitely useful: especially for choosing a city in the US – which is a definite advantage in my opinion.

The secure IP bind feature: I love it. More often than not, my issue is that I launched my VPN connection, then forget to check that sometimes it disconnected while still browsing. With Secure IP binding enabled, I can specify applications that should only work once the VPN connectin is setup. No need to worry if my VPN connection went down or not.

Random change of IP on a regular basis: while this isn’t a must for me, I guess some people would love being able to change their IP, let’s say every 30 minutes. A small disconnection will happen so as to be able to change the IP, but I think it’s worth it.

Things they could improve

For Mac, the user is invited to download and install Tun Tap driver from sourceforge . I think it would help if HideMyAss provided an installation bundle so that simple users wouldn’t have to figure out the correct Tun Tap format to download.The link to Sourceforge that is used on HideMyAss redirects to a .tar.gz file to download: I’m pretty sure most users won’t even know how to handle a .tar.gz on a Mac. They provided an installation .exe file for the Windows version, why can’t they do the same for Mac?

I’ll put the remaining of the review that deals with HideMyAss use in a second article. In the meantime, do you think the features I mentioned are interesting to you? Feel free to comment.