 Hi guys, welcome back to Daniel Stackworld. My name is Daniel Rosal and today I took a look at this VPN called TorGuard VPN. So I'm going to give a run through of the product here and what I thought was good about it. Firstly, I tested this out using Ubuntu Linux. So I tested out the Linux client to my surprise. It was an actual GUI. It was not a command line interface, which is what a lot of these VPN companies that say they support Linux actually only offer a CLI. Express is actually in that category unless I'm mistaken. Express VPN doesn't have a proper GUI for Linux. So that was that was something cool. I just want to say before I get further into this video that I'm using my podcast microphone, the condenser mic. So hopefully, unlike my previous videos, I don't sound like I'm suffering from some sort of nasal congestion in this one. So in terms of how much it costs and features, the baseline pricing, they offer a three tier model starting with the anonymous VPN. And that's basically just the VPN. I would say that their terminology is a little confusing. The most confusing thing about their terminology actually is that this actually has nothing to do with Tor. My first assumption when I when I read when I heard Tor Guard was I assumed this was like a VPN over Tor network. It actually has not only has it got nothing to do with Tor, I don't believe that they actually offer any, you know, Tor over VPN or VPN over Tor. So if you want to do VPN over Tor, and I've talked in my blog about VPNs, why you might want to run VPN over Tor and the real reason would be that you would be encrypting in a VPN tunnel your connection to the Tor entry note. So, but basically that's on you to figure out because this is not a Tor VPN combo product, it's just a VPN network. But it is actually a VPN network with a bit of a twist and I would say their twist is that they give you great info. So using the Linux line, I can see I can toggle the encryption cipher, I can toggle the encryption algorithm. And you can see here that they have the choice of using open VPN, SSTP, IPsec. So those are the connection protocols. So that's, that's quite useful. And they do, of course, if you have an open VPN, compatible router running its own firmware, then you can run this on a router. However, you may not need to because look at their connection, their simultaneous connection limit at eight devices. That is actually pretty good. It's amongst the best I've seen. In fact, I believe that Express offer either five or six. I'm not sure. I think it's six. But anyway, eight is good. So I mean, I would say if you're really looking at pushing that limit, you should probably consider just doing that. Put it running the VPN over Tor. But if you do really have eight unique devices and you want them to be all connected on the device level to the VPN, you have that option. Support 24, seven, three, six, five, their supports actually very good. I actually tested out their support and they came back to me quickly. So that was nice. They say they're a no log provider. I always the general point I make about VPNs is unless their logging policy is somehow audited, you can never really 100% trust what anybody says about their logs. But they do say that they're a 100 but no logs provider. And I don't have further details about that. I haven't looked into that aspect of it in terms of their server network, which I'll get onto in a second. They have 3000 plus servers in 50 plus countries now on another page. I believe they claim to have 68 servers in their VPN network in their VPN. I'll show that in a second. So I'm not sure what it is. There are some gaps in their server network, but that's not a bad. That's not a particularly small network was 3000 servers doesn't compare to Express or Nord that have more, but it's still a that's still a decent network. So those are their features. If you want to go for the streaming bundled. So at the monthly package, you can add these and when you're buying it, you can add these concurrently. So the streaming bundle will get you to dedicated, in other words, fixed IPs and coming out of the VPN servers, in other words, coming out of the exit node. So if you're a hardcore sports viewer, that seems to be the use case they're targeting to you may want to go for that. If you don't mind the VPN IP fluctuating a little bit between connections, then go for the basic plan. They have a business VPN service as well. And at the same same VPN network, same VPN servers, but isolated network. And you have the difference is you can see there's a dedicated account manager if you go in for this one. So those that is the business VPN tier in terms of their server network. So as I said, 3000 servers, good coverage in the Americas. I tried the US server for connecting to Netflix and I indeed had success at being able to access Netflix. You can look at their server chart according to they have it filtered according to which connection protocol is supported. Now the one problematic server as look would have it was the server in Dublin, Ireland. So I got a crummy two megabits per second connection in Dublin. However, in New York, so my baseline here is about 91 megabits per second. So that's pretty standard for me. And I also got in Taipei in Taiwan. I got 30 in the region of 30 and the region of 36 in the US of Taiwan and the US were good. Australia was a small bit slower as you would kind of expect. And the Irish server was problematic. It could have been a once off. I'll try it again in this video and you can see they have a couple of servers in Israel, one in UAE, one in Bangalore in India. So geographically, it's not a it's not a massive network. There are a few privacy hotspots that are not covered here. But for most people just using it for, you know, recreational use, you know, private use. It should be good only thing to point out for the UK because I know a lot of people subscribe to VPNs for BBC player and stuff like that. There is just one geographic location that they have a data servers in the data center in London. In terms of their the clients they support. So as I said, I was very pleased to see that they have an actual Linux GUI and not just a command line interface. Or they don't just give you a bunch of open VPN scripts and say dump those into the network manager. And there you go. You got a VPN because that's an awful lot of work. And I think if the VPN doesn't have an easy GUI, it kind of defeats a lot of the purpose. You know, you can configure the connections of network manager, but it's a lot of work. So they have a Windows client. They have a Mac OS client and I want to draw attention to their Linux offering here. As you can see, the installation file for Debian based systems such as Ubuntu and Mint and Debian itself is a dot deb. So that's obviously always nice and easy quick to install. They also have an RPM package for Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS and they actually have an arch download as well. So they really have Linux well covered and this is I think a very natural choice of VPN for Linux people just because it kind of does go that extra mile in terms of giving you information about the connectivity. In terms of their other software, their mobile software. So as you can see, they have just browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome for Android. Funnily enough, they have they give a link here both to the Google Play Store and they actually have a APK as well. So if you want to download APK, of course, you'll need to disable the security permissions for other unknown sources on Android to install that. But they have the APK as well. And I'm just checking that they keep the APK updated. They do they're both on v1.58.2. So I'm not sure why you'd want to just use the APK link, but that's there as well. And they have the open VPN configuration files as well and they have startup scripts for DDWRT. So if you do have if you have a router that's running the DDWRT on it, then you can use those scripts. Here's where stuff starts to get a little bit more advanced in a way. Say that's a good network for people looking to do stuff that's a little bit more complicated. So under servers, you can click down into SSH network and they have 1, 2, 3, 4, just UK, London 1 and 2 and USA, New York 1 and 2. Those VPN servers you can actually SSH into. Another cool tool and they have this tool drop down in the user area is the open VPN generator. So I thought this was a nice tool that I hadn't seen before. So you basically choose your operating system. You can go for default. You can specifically go for DDWRT and open WRT. You then choose your server host. So let's say I want to go for the Greek server. You choose your VPN protocol. You DPRTCP choose the port, the VPN Cypher and the open VPN version. And once you give all these things in it, you can see you get out a open VPN config file. And that's actually downloaded that as well. So you can just if you're running Linux or you want to use it on a router that, you know, it's nice that they have this generator that a lot of VPN companies have this. But it's it's done on the back end. So that's it. That's a really nice service for for more advanced users. Another nice tool I found by digging through the the website back end. The user area should say rather a little bit more was this cool. I torrent IP checker. So basically they give you a test torrent. You put that through your torrent client and it will read back to your IP address and your user agent. They also have a web RTC and the DNS leak checker. So they have these nice diagnostic tools. And again, I think this is what kind of separates tour guard from many VPNs that they seem to it does seem to be nicely geared towards users that actually know what they're doing. And they want to really make sure that they're not leaking any DNS queries and that the VPN tunnel that they're using is secure. Now, after all that talk about the back end and what it does here is the beautiful Ubuntu Linux client. So I'm being sarcastic. It's not amazing, but it's good. The fonts are a little bit ugly. I'm using this on LXDE. So you can see you get it. I mean, it's pretty. There's not really much to say about how to use this. It's just about as easy to use as any VPN client. You can call up the connection server. So I'm going to call up, for example, Dublin Ireland and protocol. I'm not going to change the default connection settings. Now, they do have this high security one S tunnel. And you also have the button here to auto connect upon tour upon sorry upon tour guard launch in terms of what's under the hood, the setting. So you do have this open. You can choose to run the VPN upon launch auto connect upon launch auto login upon connect. So that's all kind of standard stuff. Nice. It has all that now. This is something that's a little cool, a little bit different. So they do have a global kill switch. So in other words, if the connection to the VPN is lost, it'll just disconnect the it'll disconnect the internet, the network interface. But however, you can also choose a lighter, a lighter kills, which which are called up kills. That means that if there's no VPN connection, it'll terminate specific apps. So not only can you just type in the name of a CLI or a GUI or a Damon here, you can actually click on select and watch this. It actually can it'll automatically pull in everything running on the system. So if I want to, for example, add the flame shot screenshot tool, I can just add like that, click on save. And when I disconnect, when I exit out of flame shot, now after clicking on save, it should disconnect the internet so I can see if that works. Another cool feature, they have the script. So you can basically add scripts that will execute before connection after or after disconnect. And when you go into that, you get options for bat scripts or S or batch scripts on bat scripts. So basically it is, you can just create scripts to run after the connection. So again, this is something that more advanced users might appreciate. Again, some more advanced settings under network. So there is the option to prevent IPv6 leaks. This is something I thought was cool. They actually have the option to change the DNS name servers under the DNS section here when the VPN is connected. And not only that, but they actually have pre-populated some common third party DNS servers here. So if I click on when establishing VPN connection, for instance, you can see I have level three, Google, I have Open DNS, Cloudflare and Quad9. So I actually use Open DNS in general. So I can just click on Open DNS and you can even actually change the DNS used when the VPN is connected, when it's establishing and that application starts. So again, all that kind of granular detail is something you don't see in many VPNs. So I think that that all is quite cool in terms of connection speed. So I'm going to give tour guard a chance to redeem itself. So let's start by connecting to Ireland and let's see how we get on. So I'm currently just testing my internet speed before I start this and I'm pulling down about a 60 megabit per second download here. So coming back from 60 connecting into the Dublin server. I did get this error message about the server hosting I'm taking usually long every time, but I just clicked on continue and the connection made its way through. So I now have a connection up and running to their Dublin server. So let's test the internet speed and see how that fares. So I'm just using this speed tester on broadband speed test.ie and we will see what connection speed we get. So I've just checked that the IP address is correctly showing up as coming from Dublin. And actually the speed I got this time is a lot better 56 megabits per second. So starting from about 60, that's actually a really, really good very, very small decrease and the ping is 113 milliseconds. Key test for those people not in Ireland trying to access Irish services from abroad is how the RTE player looks. And it's been a while since I was on RTE player, but I think it's it's faring fairly well in terms of the selection that people are able to get. So I've just gone on to my YouTube and of course I don't recommend the people do anything that violates terms of service restrictions, such as accessing accessing content through spoofing your geolocation. So going on to my YouTube channel in order to just test out the speeds I'm getting over here and doing this. So it's not to be on content that's going to cause a copyright claim. And you can see that there is unsurprisingly at 56 megabits per second. There is absolutely no problem in streaming HD content perfectly well connecting now to the US server in New York. So let's go again and just test our speed. So I'm just using the Okla speed test again and we will see what we get through the New York server. So we're definitely seeing a small bit more in terms of an overhead versus connecting through Ireland, but we're getting up to about actually surprisingly good where actually might watch you know. So 62 was the peak. So that is actually just about our baseline. So that's very impressive. The ping is 333. I'm not sure that I'm actually selected to the right, the closest server to minimize the latency. But that's actually an incredible speed for the New York server of just about the same speed. So I'm not going to continue with the speed testing. I took a look at the Taiwanese server as well when I did this test about an hour ago and I found the speeds good there as well. So without making this a huge long review, what I would say in summary about about tour guard is that for, you know, for people that like to dig a bit into the features, it's actually got a really, really good set of just, you know, in terms of just generating those open VPN configuration files surprisingly good for VPN. I'd never heard of with a not a bad network of 3000 servers, a couple of niche geographies missing. But I like the fact they have a Linux GUI, even though it's not aesthetically beautiful. And, you know, I know there's some pushback about some of their some of their practices and features on the on the internet. I'm not a routine VPN user, but when I do use a VPN from Linux, I like to have a good connection tool. So this this based on my quick evaluation, the speeds were pretty good across the network. The tool was good, and it seemed relatively decent, although it does not have it's not named because of the onion router as in the actual tour network, it's something different. So that's it. Hope this has been of interest. If you'd like to get in touch for whatever reason, please email me at podcast or videos at DanielRosell.com. And my website is Daniel, you can also reach that through contacting DanielRosell.com until the next video.