Private Internet Access (PIA) Review 2018: A Fast And Cheap VPN Service You Can Buy
PIA VPN Q & A
1. We’d like to know few basic details like PIA’s full company name, office location, legal jurisdiction, etc.
Private Internet Access is operated by London Trust Media, Inc., we currently have a main office in Denver, Colorado, United States. We have also satellites in Iceland and Tokyo, Japan.
2. Talking about data collection, what type of data of subscribers do you collect? For how long do you store it?
For each subscriber, we only save the email address, date of subscription and count of payments.
3. For the subscribers of your service(s), what type of measures do you take to protect their privacy and enhance security?
We do not log anything (Traffic, DNS, Sessions, Metadata, timestamps, IPs). On top of that, we use an IP sharing system; which means that at any given moment, several users get attributed the same exit IP.
4. When a government or private body approaches PIA for details of an existing or past user(s), what procedure do you follow? Has this ever occurred in the past? Is the concerned user(s) informed?
While we have not received valid court orders, we periodically receive subpoenas from law enforcement agencies that we scrutinize for compliance and respond to accordingly. It is not a concern for our users as the only information we know about our customers is the email address, date of subscription and count of payments.
5. At any point during the subscription, does your VPN service deploy measure to throttle users’ connection speeds or put a bandwidth cap? Is the same done for services like P2P, Tor, etc.?
Never and we will never do this, besides – all our servers support P2P.
6. Does PIA VPN, through any means and at any time, has the knowledge of their subscribers’ real IP address when connected to the VPN service?
We do not log. Period.
7. If the cyber attacks happen against PIA VPN, what procedure do you follow? Do you have backup servers? Has such event ever occurred in the past?
We experience DDoS attacks regularly; however, we have enough servers and countermeasures in place per locations to resist even the most aggressive of attacks.
8. What are the number of PIA VPN servers and locations currently available? What are your expansion plans?
We currently have 3,111 servers in 39 locations across 25 countries. We are adding servers and new locations on a weekly basis at this point. In the last few weeks, we just added Vancouver, CA and Atlanta, US. We have Spain coming in a few days, followed thereafter by Austria and Greece. For early 2018 we are looking at Czech Republic, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and South Africa. Stay tuned for many, many more!
9. What support options are provided to the subscribers of your VPN service? Do you offer live assistance?
We currently provide 24/7 support via tickets, we also have a self-service support knowledge base (https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/hc/en-us). We will be exploring bringing back live support in early 2018, with a beta for existing customers only.
10. Does PIA have dedicated servers for Netflix streaming? Do you regularly update the server lists?
While we don’t specifically provide our service to access Netflix, our service effectively unblocks and provides access to our users within the geolocation they specify. We regularly update our server lists, but we do not expose all of our (32,000+) IP addresses for privacy reasons.
We are constantly adding more IP addresses for our users and will see a big increase in our IP count in Q1 2018.
11. What are the different payment options offered during checkout? What if a subscriber wants to pay anonymously? Do you store payment details?
We support several payment systems, including, but not limited to: PayPal, Stripe, Amazon, Google, Bitpay, ShapeShift, CashU, PaymentWall, Apple, any major store-bought gift card and OKPay. The payments details are handled by the payment processing partners, we only store the count of successful payments.
12. PIA VPN costs lower than many competitor VPN services? How can the users rest assured there aren’t any benefits compromised?
We have the luxury to offer our service at lower cost than other VPN services thanks to the economy of scale that we have achieved. Indeed, we do have unique relationships with our datacenter partners, who provide us with servers and bandwidth at preferable prices.
So, this was an in-depth review of PIA VPN. If you have any queries, let us know in the comments. To make a better choice, you can read our review of NordVPN and ExpressVPN.
