SlickVPN Review

SlickVPN is an interesting VPN provider due to where they are based. Technically, their business is based in Nevis, a small island in the Caribbean. However, due to some contrived business laws, they operate a branch of their business in the USA (in South Carolina). So for all intensive purposes, they are bound by United States laws. That means that if US law enforcement comes knocking on their door with a warrant, they would be legally forced to comply and possibly forfeit customer information. Furthermore, they could be subject to future NSA wiretapping scandals.

This is, of course, just speculation. But some people are so paranoid about the NSA due to leaked documents by Edward Snowden that they’d rather not take the risk with a domestic US VPN service. We’ll discuss their privacy policy in greater detail to help you understand what information they collect, but first we need to talk about their pricing model.

Pricing

SlickVPN is extremely competitive with their pricing, and they are definitely on the cheaper side of the spectrum. While some VPN services charge as much as $12.99 per month for a monthly subscription, SlickVPN only charges $10.00. The following is an overview of their pricing model:

• Monthly subscription: $10.00 per month

• 3 month subscription: $6.67 per month

• 6 month subscription: $5.00 per month

• Annual subscription: $4.00 per month

Their annual subscription plan offers the greatest value and the most savings (60% off). And their low prices put them in direct price competition with similar providers like IPVanish, PureVPN, PIA VPN, and others. Unfortunately, they don’t have a free trial or a free version of their service. But at such a low price, that’s understandable.

Furthermore, they have a very long money back guarantee, which lasts for 30 days. I think an entire month is more than enough time to decide whether or not you’re satisfied with their service. It’s far more common for a VPN provider to only offer a 7-day money back guarantee.

They do also have a far amount of payment options including PayPal, American Express, Master Card, Visa, Discover, and Bitcoin. You can event convert their prices into United States Dollars, pounds, and euros.

Features

In addition to their pricing, I was equally impressed with their features. For starters, they have decent global coverage with servers in 46 countries in 142 cities. This is above average global coverage, though nowhere near as expansive as PureVPN, which has servers in 140 countries.

Also, I like how they permit P2P traffic over their network, so they’re a good fit for people downloading files via Bit Torrent. It’s much more common for US based services to block P2P traffic in order to comply with copyright laws, regulations, and copyright enforcement. Basically, when a company blocks P2P traffic, they’re trying to cover their bases and remove a target from their backs. So I found it atypical that SlickVPN would support Bit Torrent.

They list some other bogus features that are little more than marketing copy such as being “the world’s fastest VPN” (yeah right), anonymous torrenting (any VPN will make you anonymous by masking your address), unlimited bandwidth, unlimited P2P traffic, and “guaranteed protection” (what does that even mean?).

Also, I love how they allow each account up to 5 simultaneous connections. I really find it irritating when a service only permits 1 or 2 simultaneous connections. Since SlickVPN permits 5, they are an optimal choice for families. More expensive services like ExpressVPN ($8.32 per month with an annual subscription) only allow simultaneous connections between one mobile device and one computer. I feel that if you’re going to shell out more money for an expensive VPN, you should at least be able to secure 5 devices at the same time.

However, SlickVPN has an interesting stipulation. You can only connect 5 devices simultaneously from 2 different IP addresses. I find this quirky and odd, and I can’t imagine what their rational is for imposing this limitation.

Privacy & Security

They do offer 256-bit encryption with OpenVPN, as well as 128-bit IPsec and 128-bit PPTP connections. As always, I must warn you to abstain from sending sensitive data over a PPTP connection since the algorithm is flawed, outdated, and easily cracked. PPTP only offers weak encryption, but it’s still useful for unlocking geo-restricted content (like streaming video) since it has less overhead.

They also have an interesting obfuscation feature to protect your anonymity and privacy, but it’s only used in the Washington, DC location. Basically, they’ll route your data through DC to create a multi-hop path, which makes it harder for ISPs and other entities to find the source of the data transmissions.

It’s still not perfectly clear how their company operates in a legal sense. I believe you’d need a degree in business law to know exactly how it all works since their based out of Nevis but have operations offices on US soil. Nevertheless, they are a strict no-logs VPN service, and they have the right to report and warn of any governmental influence through a Warrant Canary.

In fact, they post regular reports on their Warrant Canary page that helps keep users informed regarding any legal and governmental interactions with SlickVPN. They state the following on their website: “SlickVPN provides information that alerts users if any legal action is served that contains a gag order. Please visit our Warrant Canary page for details.”

SlickVPN does, of course, need to record some information about you, but they never log your online activities. The following includes necessary information that they need to record:

• Username/Password

• Apache Webserver Data

• Payment Data necessary to manage subscriptions, payments, and cancellations

• Any emails sent to our service

• Google analytics data to help market our product

• Temporary cookies to manage members area login

• email address

Despite ambiguities regarding how the company operates legally, I have to give them an A+ for security and privacy.

Speed & Stability

SlickVPN performed admirably during the speed test. The results are as follow:

• Download bandwidth: 4.81 Mb
• Upload bandwidth: 0.75 Mb
• Ping to speed test server: 76ms
• Ping to Google DNS server: about 90ms

On my 5Mbps Internet connection, I hardly lost any download speed. Some loss is always expected because encryption carries the burden of overhead, but it hardly affected my download speed. I’m not sure why, but I lost about a quarter of my upload speed.

Furthermore, the latency statistics were steady and even. The ping times to the speed test server are very reasonable. I was also pleased to see that there wasn’t a lot of jitter with the pings to the Google DNS server. Pings hovered around 90ms, fluctuating only slightly between 88ms and 93ms. Overall, the connection was very steady and secure.

So, I’d have to say that even though they test as high as other providers, they are still above average. Just from the speed test, I’d have to say that they earned a B+. They’re not the fastest provider (despite what their website claims), though at such a low price, an insignificant drop in speed can be ignored.

I didn’t have any problem browsing the web. In addition, I didn’t notice any slowness when browsing websites that are chock full of high quality images, such as flicker. Small file downloads didn’t seem to take any longer, and I could stream my favorite YouTube content without having to wait for it to buffer. All in all, I was very pleased with their speed and reliability.

Customer Service

SlickVPN’s customer service isn’t too slick. They do have 24/7 customer support, but it suffers from one colossal downfall: it’s only available via a ticketing system. Users can either open a ticket by sending an email to their support address or by using a contact form. They don’t have a telephone number listed, and unfortunately, there is no live chat feature.

Also, I wasn’t able to find the usual (and expected) knowledgebase page. Admittedly, they do have a FAQs page. But their blog doesn’t really have any specific troubleshooting or configuration guides. There are some general knowledge type questions and answers in the FAQ page, but I was disappointed with their lack of visual guides for troubleshooting and configuration.

Most providers at least take screenshots and highlight important parts of the configuration process. Still others go the extra mile and create videos showing you how to make various configuration changes. Altogether, I think that their customer service is lacking, and that they lag behind the average VPN provider’s customer service. If I were grading them, I’d have to give them a D+. Still, they do provide round the clock access to knowledgeable technicians.

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t overly pleased with their customer support, but overall, I think SlickVPN is a reliable provider. I was moderately pleased with their speeds, and I loved their privacy and security. Normally I wouldn’t recommend a service that has a few issues with customer support, but because every other quality was either above average or great, I think they’re a good option.

Plus, their prices are so much lower than many of their competitors that it may make up for less than perfect customer service. If you’re still on the fence, then I’d say give them a try. They have such a long money back guarantee (30 days) that you’ll have ample time to make a decision. Overall, I liked SlickVPN, and think they are a lot better than some of the newer VPN services.