Hotspot Shield review: Here’s a VPN that actually lives to up its hype

The name Hotspot Shield perfectly encapsulates the biggest value for most people in a VPN, shielding you while accessing a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Hotspot Shield at a glance

Servers: 2.500Countries: 70+Simultaneous connections: 5Kill switch: yesLogging: noPrice: $12.99/month, or 12 months for $95.88Best deal: $167.76 for two yearsTrial: 45-day refund guaranteeSupported platforms: iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows

Hotspot Shield surprised me — in a good way. From their marketing and promotion, they seemed more flash than substance. In an email, their CEO insisted they were the fastest VPN and had more downloads than any other VPN provider, yet they have a simplistic app, a relatively high price, and fewer simultaneous connections than some of their competitors.

In 2016, they picked up some positive coverage based on founder David Gorodyansky’s comments about protecting user privacy. Then, in 2017, a privacy group accused the company of spying on user traffic, an accusation the company flatly denies but which did cause damage to the company’s reputation. Finally, last year, ZDNet uncovered a flaw in the company’s software that exposed users. Fortunately, that was fixed immediately.

With all this, I was dreading doing a review. I expected to have to report bad news, then deal with the inevitable flack from the company for that report. But, like I said, the product surprised me.

For every country I tested, connection speed to the VPN was under two seconds. For most countries, the download speed while the VPN connection was active actually exceeded performance when not connected through a VPN.

This is astounding, and makes Hotspot Shield well worth considering.

Initiating a connection

I was a little disconcerted that as soon as the product installed, it enabled the VPN connection. I’d much rather start and stop the connection when I’m ready, or at least set it up without having it do so automatically. There were no settings presented before the connection was established.

In fact, that’s one of the weirder behavior issues I found with Hotspot Shield. You are forced to establish a VPN connection in your local country before you’re able to change to another country.

I canceled that initial connection. This is what the Hotspot Shield screen looks like before a connection is established:

As you can see, there’s a big blue start button. Up to the left, there is a hamburger menu, which, when expanded, displays Account, Settings, Like Us on Facebook, Help, and Quit. Going into Settings only presents the following options:

Other than setting your language, there’s nothing (at least, before establishing a connection) that allows you to change your connection point. Also note that the Kill Switch option is turned off by default.

There’s also no option to choose your protocol. For VPN protocol nerds, this is an anathema. But, as I’ll discuss later, this may be Hotspot Shield’s secret weapon.

Once you do go back to the main screen and hit the big button, you’re connected to a VPN server in your local country, as I am, here in the US:

You can switch countries from the little pop-up country menu under the name of the country you’re currently browsing:

Fortunately, once you change the country, Hotspot Shield remembers it, so if you always want to browse from Canada, even if you’re located in the US, it’s possible as long as you selected Canada previously.

Performance testing

I installed the Hotspot Shield application on a fresh, fully-updated Windows 10 install. To do this kind of testing, I always use a fresh install so some other company’s VPN leftovers aren’t clogging up the system and possibly influencing results. I have a 1 gig fiber feed, so my baseline network speed is rockin’ fast.

To provide a fair US performance comparison, rather than comparing to my local fiber broadband provider, I used speedtest.net and picked a Comcast server in Chicago to test download speed.

For each test, I connected to each server three times. Then, because I didn’t believe the numbers, I rebooted and retested each server an additional three times. The number shown below is the average result of all six connections.

In looking at these numbers, it’s possible to get carried away by the difference in the baseline speed compared to the VPN speed. That’s not the best measurement, mostly because I have broadband over fiber so my connection speed is extremely high.

Where you probably should get carried away is the difference between the baseline download speed and the download speed with a VPN. Let’s make sure that stands out. For my connections to Sweden, Russia, Australia, and India, using Hotspot Shield increased my connection performance.

For my Sweden connection, performance increased by 37 percent. For my connection to Russia, using Hotspot Shield’s VPN increased my performance by 20 percent. My connection to Australia only got 3 percent faster, but still, it’s faster. And my connection to India got a whopping 43 percent faster.

Here are the full details:

When you use a VPN service, it’s natural for performance to drop. After all, you’re running all your packets through an entirely artificial infrastructure designed to hide your path. The real numbers you should look at are the download speed and the ping speed. Are they high enough to do the work you need to do?

Ping speed is an indication of how quickly a response gets back after a network request is sent from your computer. The lag limitations here are due to actual physics. If you’re sending a packet across the planet, it will take longer to hear back than if you’re sending a packet across town.

How is this possible?

For a few of the connections, ping speed improved along with download speed while using Hotspot Shield.