Buffered Review - Rank #5
We take a closer look at Buffered
Updated on January 12, 2019.
Use on 5 Devices - same time
Keeps Logs of IP and time of connectionSummary
Buffered is a small Hungarian VPN provider that works with Netflix and has servers in 46 locations.
Unfortunately they keep logs of their customers IP address and time of connection and they don't have a Killswitch, which makes them a bad choice for privacy conscious users, however if privacy is not paramount to you then you can still consider their service.
We should note that they don't have their own Android and iOS apps their apps for Windows and Mac are simple to use and work fine.
Therefor Buffered can be a good choice for those users who are mainly using Windows and Mac and unblocking content on those devices is their main goal.
Signing Up
Buffered is on the pricer side of VPN providers with it's cheapest plan starting from 8$. Payment methods are PayPal, Cards and Bitcoin.
Pricing / Plans
1 month - 12,99$
1 year - 8.25$
6 months - 9.99$ (mistakenly named bi-annual, so don't bi misled that this is for 2 years)
This is not the best deal on the market, for example VPNArea offers nearly
twice as less of a price for 1 year - 2.99$/mo (with bestvpnadvice coupon).
Payment was easy and we quickly found our way to the Client Area.
Once we were logged in Members Area the layout seemed easy enough to navigate.
We found the message on top saying "UNPROTECTED" a bit annoying since we're already using a VPN when logging in. It's not necessarily that they had bad intentions when they left it there, but it would be correct to say: "You're not using Buffered" but that is up to them.
Security / Privacy:
Buffered uses AES-256 bits encryption cipher, SHA1 for hash and RSA-2048 bits RSA keys for the handshake. Blowfish-256 is used for the data channel encryption.
We tested Buffered for leaks and discovered none which was a welcomed news.
Please do note that Buffered keeps connecting time and IP logs.
Software / Apps:
Buffered's Apps have the standard options that most VPN clients have, "Start with Mac", "Auto Login", "Port", "Protocol".
No proprietary Android App.
No proprietary iOS App.
No Ad Blocking.
However unfortunately Buffered doesn't have a Killswitch option for Mac.
That's it. The Mac app is simple and it doesn't have much bells and whistles.
The Windows App seemed lean and simple however the font and the size of the elements in the app were so small that we had to use Windows Magnifier in order to navigate through the app - see screenshot.
There was no wow factor in Buffered's software for us but the basic VPN function works.
Server Performance / Speed tests
We counted servers in a total of 46 countries.
We perform our speed testing based on direct download test from 4 worldwide locations, 2 in Europe, 2 in USA, then we also perform a secondary testing via the most popular Ookla test (speedtest.net).
Please note that the results from the download tests are in Megabytes, not Megabits like Ookla's so they should be multiplied by 8 for reference. More details of our speed tests below:
No specialised servers or anything.
It does work with Netflix, we liked that. Not many companies can unblock Netflix.
We did not like that Buffered does not indicate in which cities or states are their servers. For many users that would make all the difference in terms of speed. But also they only seem to have 1 location per country, with the exception of USA
USA East Coast server
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100MB-dallas.bin.3 100%[===================>] 100.00M 3.91MB/s in 56s
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6944546240
26.94 5.93
US Mid Coast server
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2019-01-07 18:02:22 (2.04 MB/s) - ‘100MB-dallas.bin.4’ saved [104857600/104857600]
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6944561635
26.95 3.08
Romaniaserver
100MB-frankfurt.bin 100%[===================>] 100.00M 1.08MB/s in 86s
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6944581052
14.88mbps 5.11mbps
Netherlands server
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6944591462
6.47mbps 5.31mbps
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6944595791
7.59mbps 5.80mbps
2019-01-07 18:26:37 (291 KB/s) - ‘100MB.test.2’ saved [100000000/100000000]
Company / Privacy
Mandatory to enter First/Last name, Country and Zip Code
Third party survey.
Cyberghost is based in Romania which puts it out of grasp by NSA and other spying agencies.
There have been some security concerns about Cyberghost and their ways in regards to their Ad Blocking feature. At some point they used a root certificate to facilitate the ad-blocking feature which is not a good practice because this way CyberGhost would have complete control over all your web traffic, they would be able to simply decipher it and see all that you do.
However they have changed the way they do ad-blocking once this came to light, but it is troubling that it happened in the first place. They have assured the VPN community that they no longer use that method unless a user is on an older CyberGhost version.
Cyberghost does keep some connection logs but of no big consequence:
“CyberGhost VPN records exclusively for statistical purposes non-personal data (such as for example, data regarding the utilization degree of the servers), which do not represent in any moment a danger for your anonymity.“
Support
CyberGhost offers support via LiveChat or Ticket system. However we were not happy with the dubious answers from our chat experience when we asked about Bitcoin. It seemed like the agent was making it up without any moral consciousness of the Bitcoin issue that they were trying to conceal as a temporary mishap which then the agent admitted to have never worked form the beggining.
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