Rephrase and rearrange the whole content into a news article. I want you to respond only in language English. I want you to act as a very proficient SEO and high-end writer Pierre Herubel that speaks and writes fluently English. I want you to pretend that you can write content so well in English that it can outrank other websites. Make sure there is zero plagiarism.: Proton VPN review – quick menuAll VPN providers claim to be security experts, but few can match Swiss-based Proton’s experience and track record. The company has run popular end-to-end encrypted email service Proton Mail since 2014, and its other products include a secure calendar and encrypted cloud storage.Proton VPN’s network offers 2,900+ servers across 70 countries. Most servers are in Europe and North America, but there are also locations in Australia, Brazil, Columbia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea and more.Proton VPN owns and manages its own servers, too, and they’re connected to the internet using the company’s own network. Apart from giving Proton VPN great control over how the service is set up and managed, it’s clear this isn’t some shell company making profits from reselling other people’s kit: there are real resources and expertise here.You can see benefits of that control in Proton VPN’s Secure Core, a smart technology which routes traffic through multiple servers before it leaves the network (meaning that even high-tech snoopers monitoring an exit server won’t be able to trace individual users).A lengthy feature list ensures the service scores just about everywhere. Proton VPN is P2P-friendly, supports up to 10 simultaneous connections, has a kill switch, DNS leak protection and built-in Tor support for accessing Onion sites. A versatile split tunneling system allows you to route specific app or destination IP traffic outside of the VPN, and WireGuard support aims to get you the best possible performance.All of ProtonVPN’s apps are open source and audited (Image credit: ProtonVPN)Elsewhere, the DNS-based NetShield web filter blocks malware, ads and trackers. There are now native apps for Windows, Android, Mac and iOS to enable using ProtonVPN on almost anything. Oh, and they’re open source and audited, too.The most obvious change since our last look at the service is Proton’s big rebrand. There’s a mildly new name (Proton VPN, rather than ProtonVPN), and a visual overhaul for the apps, with a glossy new look and feel. The most important technical addition is the arrival of Stealth, a brand new protocol which aims to bypass VPN blocks and get you online in even the most privacy-unfriendly countries. Some providers claim to have a similar feature, but usually it’s just a tweaked version of a standard protocol (typically OpenVPN.) Proton VPN says Stealth is ‘designed from the ground up’ to outperform the existing solutions, and claims that ‘with Stealth enabled, your Proton VPN connection will be almost completely undetectable.’ It’s too early to tell how Stealth compares in real-world use, but if you’re heading off to China or anywhere else that blocks VPNs, you can test it with Proton VPN’s free Mac, Android and iOS apps (Windows support is on the way.)Elsewhere, the Windows app now includes port forwarding, improving P2P speeds. The underpowered Proton Basic plan has been dropped, and you can now opt to buy the VPN and all Proton’s other services in a new security suite.Proton VPN: what’s new?ProtonVPN’s free service has dropped its ability to choose locations, unfortunately. Previously you could select from servers in Japan, Netherlands or USA. Now, all you can do is hit a ‘Fastest’ button and the app will choose the best server for you from five countries: Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, United States.That makes the service far less useful for unblocking, and could introduce new problems. Previously, if you chose a location, you knew that’s what you’d get. Now, if you’re a similar distance from two or three locations, you might get a different one each time. That could be bad news if you’re visiting websites which change how they work depending on your location.Elsewhere, ProtonVPN has unveiled ProtonVPN for Business, which is essentially the regular consumer product with some valuable business-oriented features. Customers can set up private gateways with dedicated servers and IP addresses, for instance, then restrict their access to authorized users or groups. This allows a company to create a gateway giving secure access to their accounts systems, for instance, and ensure it’s available to members of the accounts team, but not to anyone else.(Image credit: Proton)There’s a new Linux app, which not only has a stylish interface, but is also crammed with features: a kill switch, the NetShield ad, malware and tracker blocker, port forwarding, Proton’s speed-boosting VPN accelerator, its Secure Core servers, and more.The apps have seen a range of small tweaks and fixes. Most are small, under the hood and unlikely to be noticed by anyone, but there are welcome touches, including extra language support for Japanese, Georgian, Greek, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean and more.Proton VPN pricingThe Proton VPN Plus plan delivers all the features we’ve described above, covers 10 devices, and can be yours for $9.99 billed monthly, $5.99 on the annual plan, or $4.99 over two years. That’s a little above average, and you can get very capable VPNs for less (Private Internet Access is just $3.33 a month on its annual plan, Atlas VPN charges just $1.99 a month over three years).A new Proton Unlimited plan gets you all Proton’s services in a single subscription. That’s the full VPN, 500GB of Proton Drive’s secure storage, 15 secure Proton Mail email addresses, and end-to-end encrypted scheduling of your day with Proton Calendar.Proton Unlimited looks reasonably priced at $12.99 billed monthly, $9.99 on the annual plan, or $7.99 over two years. If we take the last plan, that’s only an extra $3 a month for access to Proton’s other services. That’s a fair price, even if you’ll only use the storage. (Microsoft’s OneDrive Standalone costs $1.66 billed annually for less features and only 100GB.)Proton VPN will take payment via card, PayPal, Bitcoin, even cash if you’re looking for extreme anonymity.Any payments are (sort of) protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. The potential catch here is that you’ll only get a refund for any unused subscription time. If you sign up for a month and ask for a refund after 15 days, for instance, the company only returns 50% of your subscription fee.Fortunately, Proton VPN also offers a free plan, giving you unlimited time to sample the service before you part with any cash.This has some significant limits. It covers just one device, supports ‘medium speeds’ only, and gives you access to 100+ servers in just three countries (US, Netherlands, Japan).But the crucial advantage is it has no paltry data limits: you can use Proton VPN Free as much as you like. That’s a big deal, and makes Proton VPN interesting all on its own.Thanks to ProtonVPN’s free plan, you can protect your privacy online without a monthly fee (Image credit: Proton VPN)Privacy and securityProton VPN’s Swiss home gives it an immediate privacy advantage over most of the competition. The country has very strong privacy laws, is outside of US and EU jurisdiction, and not a member of the ’14 eyes’ surveillance network.The company states its logging policy very clearly on the website: “ProtonVPN is a no logs VPN service. We do not track or record your internet activity, and therefore, we are unable to disclose this information to third parties.”Session logging is almost non-existent. The company stores the timestamp of the last successful login attempt, but that’s it. This is overwritten when you next log in, so the most Proton VPN will know about your account use is the start time of your last session.Proton VPN associates your account with an email address when you sign up, but this address can be whatever you like. The company suggests using ProtonMail if you’d prefer to remain completely anonymous.Sign up for the free plan and you’re not asked for payment details. Choose something else and you can opt to pay by Bitcoin. Or for real anonymity, you can just send the company some cash. Not exactly convenient, but you’ll know you’re not leaving any electronic audit trail.There was more good news in January 2020 when Proton VPN released the generally positive results of SEC Consult’s independent audit on its apps. We’d like to see another (three years is a…
