My Speed Test of HideMyAss Servers

HideMyAss! Speed Test
HideMyAss! is one of the oldest and most well-know VPNs around. Their massive number of servers and locations - untouchable by any other provider - combined with solid speed test results and an easy to use client can more than make up for a few privacy concerns and slightly higher subscription costs.

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Pros
  • Servers in nearly every country in the world
  • Good performance
  • Super simple to use client
  • Plenty of advanced features
  • Free web proxies for anonymous browsing
Cons
  • A bit expensive compared to the competition
  • Based out of the UK - not great for privacy
  • Unclear P2P policy

The HideMyAss Speed Tests

Unlike most VPN providers, HMA does not make many speed claims on their website. But, they certainly could. While performance is not mind-blowing, my tests have shown that their servers can more than hold their own.

For most locations, download speeds were comfortably over 50 Mbps and sometimes quite a bit higher. Uploads were similarly impressive with 40 Mbps speeds or quicker in the majority of cases.

I also noticed and was impressed with how consistent performance was across multiple test runs at the same location. Every time I disconnected and reconnected the VPN and did a new test, the results were steady. That’s a good thing.

The two outlier locations for me were Australia and Canada.

The lower speeds in Australia are likely due to my rather large geographical distance to the country, and I don’t consider it particularly alarming.

Canada, on the other hand, performed quite poorly both up and down without an apparent cause. Latency (ping time) was also significantly higher than it should be. I interpret these results as something gone awry on HMA’s end – hopefully, they’ll address these issues soon. In the meantime, if Canada is what you’re interested in, I suggest having a look at NordVPN.

And if you’re wondering how HideMyAss! speeds compare to other top VPN providers, take a look at the handy-dandy table near the bottom of the homepage. There, you’ll find the results for the fastest seven VPNs I have tests (though sadly for HMA, they’re not one of them).

Best Server
HideMyAss best VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss best server baseline speed test results
No VPN
United States
HideMyAss Unites States VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss Unites States baseline speed test results
No VPN
United Kingdom
HideMyAss United Kingdom VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss United Kingdom baseline speed test results
No VPN
Canada
HideMyAss Canada VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss Canada baseline speed test results
No VPN
Australia
HideMyAss Australia VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss Australia baseline speed test results
No VPN
Netherlands
HideMyAss Netherlands VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss Netherlands baseline speed test results
No VPN
Germany
HideMyAss Germany VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss Germany baseline speed test results
No VPN
France
HideMyAss France VPN server speed test results
With VPN
HideMyAss France baseline speed test results
No VPN

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About HideMyAss

A veteran of the industry, HideMyAss has been around since 2005. They are currently owned by Avast Software, a leading antivirus and security software company. HMA is not only one of the original consumer VPN providers, but also one of the largest. With their ever increasing popularity over the years, they have grown their hardware to over 1111 servers in 218 countries around the world. Those are big numbers.

Privacy and Security

Being owned by a security company, I would expect HideMyAss to have industry-leading security features. Unfortunately, while they’re passable, they’re far from top notch. HMA implements 128-bit Blowfish data encryption, which falls short of the AES-256 standard used by most competitors. Things don’t look much better in the hash authentication and handshaking encryption departments, where HideMyAss uses SHA1-160 and RSA-1024 respectively. Again, both could be better.

Privacy is also a weak spot for HideMyAss. Reading over their logging policy reveals they collect and retain several key bits of information. Specifically, the policy states they log the following:

  • Username
  • A time stamp when you connect and disconnect to our VPN service
  • The amount data transmitted (upload and download) during your session
  • The IP address used by you to connect to our VPN
  • The IP address of the individual VPN server used by you

This data is more than sufficient to uniquely identify you and track your online activity when needed. Combine that with the fact that HMA is based in the UK, which has strict mandatory data retention laws and is consider the worst western country in the world when it comes to privacy, and I would stay clear of this provider if privacy is your primary concern. Instead, use one one of the other VPN providers that get top marks for privacy.

None of the HideMyAss legal documentation or policies seem to mention BitTorrent usage, and least not that I could find. So, if it is your intent to use P2P networks, treat carefully, especially considering some of the privacy concerns mentioned above.

On the plus side, all checks I usually do to find DNS or WebRTC leaks passed with flying colors. The HMA server setup appears to be solid in that respect.

Features

HideMyAss is all about ease of use, and it shows. Both their website and clients could not be much simpler to understand and navigate, making this service a great choice for novice VPN users.

However, software simplicity does come at a cost. There are only three options to choose from. You connect to the nearest server, which will give you the best possible speeds, pick a specific country or city from HMA’s massive list, or use Freedom Mode. The latter will connect you to the closest free-speech country, and frankly, is not much more than a gimmick.

Other features are pretty much non-existent. So, if you’re more advanced and looking for kill switch protection or the ability to fine tune your connection parameters, you may want to look at one of the other fast VPN providers.

HideMyAss also doesn’t allow you to select the protocol. They force you to use OpenVPN on the Windows, MacOS, Android and Linux clients, and IPSec on the iOS client. On the bright side, OpenVPN is, in my humble opinion, by far the best choice. So, kudos to HMA for at least picking it as their go-to.

There are several free services HMA offers which anyone can take advantage of. Through a Firefox or Chrome extension, you can gain access to things like an IP checker and a web proxy service. The latter is especially nice for anyone looking to browse content that is geo-restricted at their location. Note, that with the free proxy service, there is no support for encryption, streaming or gaming. Anyone looking to do one of these things will have to get a full paid VPN subscription.

Restrictions

The number of simultaneous connection under HMA’s acceptable use policy is set at 2. That is definitely on the low end. Anyone who abuses this limit is subject to account suspension, so be sure to keep tabs on how many devices you have connected at any given time. If you need for more connections, your best bets are either Nord VPN which allows up to 6 connections, or Buffered and Private Internet Access which both allow 5.

Other than the number of concurrent connections, HMA has few other limitations. There are no time of day or bandwidth restrictions. As long as you don’t use the VPN service to spread viruses, hack, send spam or any other frowned upon internet behavior, you should be in the clear.

Customer Support

On the customer support front, HideMyAss does score very well and offers everything I have come to expect from a top VPN provider. You can get in touch with support using either e-mail or live chat. HMA has also built out an extensive knowledge base, which should answer most, if not all, of your questions.

Support responsiveness is snappy. Even at odd times on weekends, I have received knowledgeable and helpful chat replies in just minutes. HMA also does social media very well. They regularly post helpful and engaging content on their Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts.

Your HideMyAss subscription comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. There are, however, a few caveats. These rules have been put in place to cover HMA against abuse by less than honest users.

The biggest limitation of the refund policy is that you must have used less than 10GB of data (this includes both upload and download), and have not connected to the service more than 100 times. You can also only request a refund once and cannot do so for renewals. These restrictions are all fair enough and should not be an issue for anyone wanting to evaluate the service. But, you do need to keep them in mind.

Server Locations

This is where HideMyAss truly shines. With 1111 servers in 218 countries, they are the undisputed champions of VPN server locations.

Only PureVPN’s servers used to come close. But with a recently reduced network that now features only 74 countries, they’re further away than ever.

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About Tim Tremblay

Tim is the founder of Fastest VPN Guide. He comes from a world of corporate IT security and network management and knows a thing or two about what makes VPNs tick. Cybersecurity expert by day, writer on all things VPN by night, that’s Tim. You can also follow him on Twitter and Quora.

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