HideMyAss review

Today, one of the popular VPN providers is HideMyAss (HMA). The founder of the company, Jack Cator. The idea behind the service back in 2005 for Jack was to bypass blocking access to music and games on the school network. In this review, we will try to understand the key issues, whether the service will protect your digital identity on the Internet, how it will cope with unblocking popular streaming platforms, how good is the performance of its servers and other aspects that are important when choosing a VPN service.

There are black spots in HMA's past reputation, remember at least the case of Cody Kretsinger. Yes, he was engaged in non-legal activities, which contradicts the company and it gave the authorities data on a member of the LulzSec team, accordingly it follows that the company was collecting logs on its users. There is even information that the service cooperated with the authorities, but it’s not verified information, so we will not refer to it. Since recently, the company has corrected itself and stated that it does not keep logs of its users, which is one of the key criteria when choosing a VPN service.

In terms of choice of VPN protocols, the service is inferior to competitors, HMA uses only two protocols Open VPN and IPSec/IKEv2, but it’s worth noting that these protocols are open source, with strong encryption algorithms and provide high performance, which can provide anonymity to your digital identity on the Internet.

General highlights

HMA VPN uses strong military-grade AES 256-bit encryption, which is hard to imagine protecting your data today. The connection between the client and the service is made through RSA keys with SHA256 hash authentication, which is strong protection for your online traffic.

Protection against DDoS attacks. With DDoS attacks cybercriminals send a huge number of requests to your site in order to cause a denial of service, protection against such attacks is necessary not only for the owners of casinos and large corporations, as well as the owners of sites that sell their products online, sites that provide various services online and service provides us to protect the integrity of our connection.

The service in almost all applications uses one of the most popular and reliable protocols today OpenVPN, the protocol was developed by Jeff Yonan open source, for encrypting the tunnel OpenVPN uses the library OpenSSL, the protocol easily bypasses HTTP and NAT. The IKEv2/IPSec protocol is excellent for mobile applications, it is open-source, provides high performance and has strong encryption algorithms. To get rid of IP stalking, they offer a really good solution called IPShuffle to get rid of IP stalking.

With this toolkit, we can stop worrying about our anonymous digital identity and continue surfing the web without fear that someone will intercept our traffic and expose our data and history of your surfing.

HMA headquarters is located in the UK, and this is the country of the Five Eyes Alliance, who does not know, this intelligence alliance was created in cooperation between countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States for the purpose of intelligence sharing, it seemed nothing to fear, but cooperation also involves surveillance of online activities of the Internet user, which they may be interested in. Naturally, this fact is a disadvantage of the service, as the jurisdiction of the UK is not considered a favorable country for the privacy of your data.

Let's talk now about the pluses, it is undoubtedly the absence of logging, although the service still partially collects information about you, as stated by the provider, for diagnostic purposes and so that the service is not used by criminals for fraudulent and other purposes. But most importantly, the service does not collect data of your IP address, from which you connect to VPN, the sites you visit while connected, and the actual data you receive or transmit while on the Internet.

We can also observe that the service claims to provide built-in protection from leaks IPv4, IPv6, and other DNS queries, which of course is a big plus for maintaining your anonymity.

And of course, we should also mention the WebRTC leak protection. WebRTC is a technology for browsers to communicate directly without an intermediate server, respectively higher speed and lower latency and WebRTC leakage means that your real public IP address can be detected, thereby compromising your privacy, protection from such leakage is of course a plus for additional protection of your privacy.

HMA has more than 290 VPN servers in 210 countries. The servers are well optimized and have a fairly high speed, namely 20 Gbps.

HMA has a large server network, given the number of countries, the vast majority are physical servers, but also there are virtual servers, they also work fine, physically they are located outside the country, but the IP address use the region to which you want to connect, they are needed because of the inability due to geographical limitations of countries or other reasons to install the server physically

List of countries:

Afghanistan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belarus, Belize, Belgium, Benin, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Bhutan, Vanuatu, Vatican, Ethiopia, Hungary, Venezuela, Vietnam, Gabon, Guiana, Gambia, Ghana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guinea, Bissau, Germany, Gibraltar, Honduras, Hong Kong, Greenland, Grenada, Grenada, Greece, Georgia, Guam, Denmark, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Israel, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Yemen, Cabo-Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Qatar, Kenya, Cyprus, Kiribati, China, Cocos [Keeling] Islands, Colombia, Comoros Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, Kuwait, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mexico, Mozambique, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montserrat, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Nigeria, Netherlands, Nicaragua, New Caledonia, Norway, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Island Pitcairn, Turkey, Caicos Islands, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Territory New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Romania, Salvador, Samoa, San Marino, San Tome and Principe Saint Lucia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Svalbard i Jan Mayan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, North Korea, Saint Pierre et Miquelon, Senegal, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Serbia, Singapore, Syria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunis, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, Faroe Islands, Fiji, Philippines, Finland, France, Croatia, Chad, Chile, African Republic, Czech Republic, Sweden, Equatorial Guinea, Estonia, South Africa, South Korea, Jamaica, Japan, American Samoa, Andorra, Russia, Macao, Niue, Palau, Australia, Azerbaijan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, USA, United Kingdom

Customer service is also an important criterion for evaluating a VPN service, here HMA did not disappoint us, if you have any questions that require immediate solutions, you can contact support via online chat, which is available 24/7, you can also send a letter by mail.

The site is filled with a lot of useful information that will be useful to you, there is also a section with frequently asked questions and if you have difficulties with installing applications or setting them up, you can also on the site installation guides, which describe everything in an accessible language in detail. There's also a community forum where you can ask questions yourself, or you can find out if someone has already encountered a detailed problem.

Pros

✓ Unblocks Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Amazon Video, Hulu
✓ Fast enough speeds for streaming
✓ IP Shuffle feature
✓ Huge number of available countries
✓ Uses strong encryption

Cons

✘ Registered in the UK, which is part of the Five Eyes Alliance
✘ Partially collects logs
✘ Doesn't work in China
✘ The full functionality is not available in iOS apps