Anonymous VPN & Proxy Blog

Welcome to 2013, the year of internet security. In a time when Mark Zuckerburg has robbed the world of privacy, your online identity and anonymity has never been so crucial. More and more people are taking matters into their own hands, signing up for VPN services and encrypting their online traffic. Ten years ago, a VPN user may have been labeled as “overly-paranoid”, however these days it’s just another layer of security to go along with your anti virus software. You wouldn’t think of opening an unknown email attachment without first scanning for a virus, so why would you connect to that hotel wifi without encrypting your personal info? Exactly. Times are changing, and so are VPN security and encryption methods. Today we’re answering some of the “tough” questions that other VPN service providers don’t like to answer. Here at Torguard, we’re pretty obsessed with privacy – and it shows.

I recently sat down with a TorGuard Network engineer and asked him the questions that no VPN provider likes being asked. This is what he had to say:

1. Does TorGuard keep ANY logs which would allow your staff or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and time stamp to a user of TorGuard VPN Service?

TorGuard doesn’t store IP’s or time stamps on our VPN/proxy servers, not even for a second. It’s impossible to match what is not there. Since some people tend to misbehave when using a VPN , this raises the obvious question: how do we maintain a fast, abuse-free network? If even our network engineer can’t back track the abuser by IP, then how do we stop it? Through packet level filtering at the firewall it’s possible to apply rules to an entire shared server, blocking the abuse immediately. For example, let’s say someone decides to use TorGuard to unlawfully promote their ugg boots business (spam). In order for us to block this one individual, we would simply implement new firewall rules, effectively blocking the abused protocol for everyone on that VPN server. Since there are no user log’s to go by, we handle abuse in real time – per server, not per user.

2. Under what jurisdictions does TorGuard operate?

TorGuard recently went through some corporate restructuring and has now moved its parent company to Nevis, West Indies. Our company abides by all International laws and data regulations imposed within our legal jurisdiction. Our staff works from the cloud and is scattered around the world.

3. When would TorGuard VPN share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

We don’t share any information with anyone regarding our network or its users and won’t even consider communicating with a 3^rd party unless they’ve first obtained adequate representation within our legal jurisdiction. Only in the event of an official court ordered ruling would we be forced to hand over blank hard drives. There’s nothing to hand over but an operating system.

4. If  TorGuard were to receive a DMCA takedown notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?

TorGuard complies immediately (24 hours or less) with all DMCA takedown notices. Since it’s impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we block the infringing protocol in its entirety, whatever it may be – Kazaa, HTTP, Jabber, Citrix, Bittorrent, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, ect. This ensures the content in violation is immediately removed from that server and no longer active on our network.

5. Which protocols do you support?

We fully support OpenVPN, L2TP and PPTP as well as offering socks5 torrent proxy services. Our OpenVPN service offers both UDP/TCP connection options on a variety of ports and is configured to work in countries like China, Iran, Syria, or UAE where VPN protocols and ports are heavily filtered by ISP’s at government request.  Since most of our OpenVPN servers are setup to run disguised over SSL ports, this also means you can browse the latest cat meme’s freely from within strict corporate, school or government firewalls.

6. What countries does TorGuard have VPN server endpoints in?

TorGuard operates high speed exit servers in the United States, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Switzerland and New Zealand.

7. Which forms of payment does TorGuard accept?

We accept all forms of credit card, Visa, Amex, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal , Google Checkout and Bitcoins. We also accept anonymous payments through our pre-paid PIN system. These pre-paid service PIN numbers can be purchased from one of our participating online resellers and redeemed during checkout on our website.

8.  How are payments linked to individual user accounts?

Our client billing area and VPN/Proxy user auth servers are two completely separate systems. This is to ensure the privacy and securities of our customer’s accounts are upheld at all times. While the customer’s chosen payment method will be linked to the client billing area login, this information is kept completely separate from their VPN/Proxy network. In this way, it’s virtually impossible to “connect the dots” of a paying customer with that of someone who is using the servers.  This can become a pain for clients as they are required to remember two sets of logins/passwords, but trust us – It’s in the best interest of security.

9. Is file-sharing traffic allowed?

Yes. We allow file sharing on all of our servers except USA, UK and NZ. These servers are optimized for streaming services like Netflix, hulu or BBC, not p2p.

10. If so, is it (or other traffic) throttled in any way?

We do not shape traffic or throttle connections on any of our servers. This allows for fast connections and unlimited bandwidth/speeds. TorGuard VPN Service provides Unlimited access and bandwidth on all of our servers.

11. What is the maximum connection limit?

This depends heavily on the speed of the client’s connection as we don’t limit the connection throughput at all on our end. All of our servers feature gigabit+ port speeds, so DL rates can vary from 5mbps – 30mbps depending on your connection speed and ping. We’re also one of the only VPN service providers that allows 5 simultaneous connections per account. This means you can secure all your devices, Laptop, Desktop, Smartphone, Router, all with one VPN account. Try our speed our for yourself with our FREE VPN Service trial, now available.