Founded in 2001 by a small group of Silicon Valley engineers, Ultrasurf was built for the sole purpose of creating the world’s best anti-censorship software. The tool was first designed to aid residents in China where online activities are largely restricted and Internet users are highly monitored. After a decade of developing its technology, Ultrasurf has created a resilient tool that’s able to adapt to every Internet censorship threat.
With millions of users from 180 countries today, it’s disappointing to see that Ultrasurf doesn’t have an impressive feature set; it lacks the basics such as a kill switch and leak protection. Its customer support is insufficient, just like its customer protection policies.
With few features and clear gaps in privacy and logging policies, we don’t recommend Ultrasurf. If you want to collaborate with a top-notch VPN provider that will protect the security and privacy of your Internet connection, we advise you to look at some of the other VPN providers we have reviewed on our website.
One of the most intriguing characteristics of Ultrasurf is that it offers services completely free of charge. However, we have seen on countless occasions that free VPN services are not as competent as paid ones.
Let’s still not discount the possibility of Ultrasurf offering quality services. Here are Ultrasurf’s features:
These are all the features offered by Ultrasurf. In all honesty, nothing is thrilling about them. There is no mention of a kill switch, unlimited speed, leak protection, or torrenting support. Ultrasurf also claims to keep logs of your Internet activity for 30 days, and that’s a major issue.
Ultrasurf claims to have millions of users from 180 countries. Unfortunately, not much was elaborated on its website to make things clearer about its server network. All we were able to find was this information about Ultrasurf’s reach:
This leaves us with many unanswered questions: Which particular countries have Ultrasurf’s servers? What is the average speed of its servers? Does Ultrasurf support geo-unblocking?
With little information presented on Ultrasurf’s website, all we can do is guess, and this does not bode well for Ultrasurf in our books. A good VPN should be open and honest about this type of information.
As was the case with the previous section about Ultrasurf’s server network, there was not a sufficient amount of data about the speed and reliability. Ultrasurf claims to offer fast page loads, except for its servers in Iran which are overloaded at the moment.
Other than the above information, there was no further information describing the speed and stability of UltraSurf’s VPN connection. Quality VPNs make claims about what you can expect, with solid numbers, so that you can see whether or not they’re meeting their promises. They promise you nothing, and you’re likely to get nothing good in return.
Ultrasurf provides VPN services completely free of charge. By providing an encrypted tunnel, Ultrasurf allows its users to browse the Internet freely and securely.
Users can download their VPN client on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Ultrasurf also developed an Android app that’s compatible with mobile devices, but there is one crucial thing that you should know about this tool:
The security of your personal data is not absolute with the Android app, and hackers or other third-party users can still have a way of reaching your personal data. It is clear that certain limitations come with this VPN client, and it is a good thing that Ultrasurf is open about it.
Customer support is a vital aspect of what makes a top VPN provider, but not all VPN providers offer quality support. Here’s how Ultrasurf handles customer support issues:
If you think two bullet points describing customer support is insufficient, we agree with you. There is no live chat, blog, FAQ, resources, knowledge base, case studies, or any other form of customer support content that might help you tackle potential issues and obstacles. In fact, Ultrasurf’s entire contact page consists only of this:
It’s brief and poor one. Our experience from reviewing hundreds of VPN providers allows us to confirm that this kind of customer support is nowhere near the level of a top-quality VPN provider.
Another way to protect your clients is by offering rock-solid customer protection policies. VPN providers are well aware of that. You can easily tell apart the scammers from the quality providers simply by going over their protection policies.
Ultrasurf offers the following customer protection policies:
As you can see, these customer protection policies are not exactly iron-clad. We don’t like the fact that Ultrasurf keeps records of your logs for up to 30 days and allows third parties to use cookies to collect data from you.
We conclude this Ultrasurf review by stating the obvious—Ultrasurf can’t be trusted. We say this simply because of the apparent flaws we found in its privacy and logging policies. Your personal data will not be safe, as Ultrasurf monitors your activity for 30 days. On top of that, third parties may also access your data through cookies.
Even though Ultrasurf’s services are free, there were not many things that impressed us about this VPN provider. It offers a weak feature set, its server network is not adequately described, and the speed and stability of its VPN connection are also not clear. Customer support is virtually non-existent; Ultrasurf only allows users to make contact through email.
Our final verdict: Ultrasurf is a below-average VPN provider. We recommend that if you are reading this because cost is a concern that you see our reviews of the best quality VPNs with affordable prices. These cheap VPNs are trusted, and reasonably priced.
Our ratings for ultrasurf review are based on our professional experience and extensive tests with VPN providers between April 2014 – July 2014, taking into account user feedback and reviews we receive. As a friendly disclosure, some VPN providers do compensate us for customers we refer them, but this in no way effects their ranking on our website, nor our reviews.
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