VPN Services: HideMyAss Review – Part 2

If you haven’t read the first part of this review, you can still check it out here.

In fact, initially, I wanted to try HMA with my Android phone (still a 2.1). After checking the documentations, I found out that I needed to use the PPTP version (which, by the way, has a different credential than the one you’ve been given when buying HMA). After configuring my Android phone, as per the HMA provided documentation, I had hard times connecting, my phone kept on reporting “Attention: Server hung up. The username or password you entered could be incorrect. Do you want to try again?“.

After going back-and-forth between the documentation and my phone, I couldn’t find anything wrong. I even tried to change the PPTP credentials from HMA’s backoffice with no success. I finally decided to contact HMA support with my issue, and, to my surprise, I received an answer almost 10 minutes after I sent my e-mail that advised me to use L2TP instead of PPTP. So I reconfigured my Android phone on L2TP by using the PPTP credentials, and heck I could at least connect via VPN. Frankly speaking, I found it hectic to get my Android phone connected with HMA, so I decided to test it on my Windows laptop (If you want me to review it a bit further on my Android phone, feel free to ask it in the comment section).

So as to give a good background on this test, it’s worth mentioning the platform I am using: I am using an updated Windows 7 laptop with the latest and current HideMyAss software (version 2.6.9) that has been installed through their windows installation package (you know me, I’m always using the simplest solution that is provided to me so as to help those who don’t really want to care about the technical stuffs).

First thing I noticed, it takes a few seconds before the HideMyAss dashboard gives you the hand for entering your credentials (username and password)- mainly because there seems to be some initializations that are made in the background. Well, it’s not realy a big deal, but for the impatient people out there, it may be disturbing.

What I found really interesting with HMA is that it has a LoadBalancing feature that is enabled by default. This means that if you want to connect to a country that has multiple servers, you can specify, for example, that once one server reaches 30% (the default settings), HMA will switch to another server. In my opinion, this can come handy so as to enjoy a great VPN service, provided that the online service you’re reaching do not penalize you from changing your IP services too often.

Anyway, I’ve run HMA, by chosing the OpenVPN protocol (which is my preferred protocol), entered my credentials, then ended up with the following error message

Ok, so I accepted to use PPTP (although a bit skeptical since I already had a PPTP issue with Android), but anyway, I’m here for testing. Unfortunately, the result was the same: I couldn’t establish a VPN connection either.

After reading the documentation, I’ve been advised to run the diagnostic  which is located on the “connection log (large view” tab). This is a 11 steps check that creates a very technically detailed report. So I run it, then generated the report, and now I’m off to sending it to HMA support again. Let’s see how it ends up.

Stay tuned for the issue of this review