ZorroVPN Review

ZorroVPN

An expert-level VPN service with advanced privacy mechanisms and a focus on your best online anonymity.

Pros:

• Military-grade privacy protection mechanisms
• Good speed and good server locations
• Allows torrenting
• Various methods of customer support, including dedicated TeamViewer assistance

Cons:

• Prices for subscription are on the higher side
• Rather time-consuming configuration
• Doesn’t allow streaming from Netflix, BBC iPlayer, or Amazon Prime Video

More and more individual users are now turning to VPN (Virtual Private Network) services as a means of protecting their private information and online traces both on desktop and mobile devices.

ZorroVPN is a professional VPN service that has recently caught our attention with its advanced technologies in the security area and its dedication to providing its customers with the greatest possible defense of their privacy. That’s why, in the next lines, we will review all the major features and characteristics of this service and will give you our final verdict.

Credibility

ZorroVPN is a service registered in Belize City, Belize, by the company Network Octet Ltd. The service stands for anonymity on the Internet and provides its users with access to approximately 250 IP addresses and 80 Servers in over 40 countries. Some of the locations that are accessible include Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Russia, Vietnam, Israel, Moldova, the United States of America and South Africa.

A good point on its credibility is that, every month, the company publishes a cryptographically signed message that declares that up to that point, ZorroVPN does not directly or indirectly knows of any backdoors or potential backdoors to its service. This message may not have the same weight as an independent audit (which some competitors in the VPN sector are implementing) by it does give an initial feel of trust.

Privacy protection and encryption evaluation

We are pleasantly surprised by ZorroVPN’s list of advanced features and specialized technologies used to secure your anonymity, some of which aren’t commonly seen in competitor services. There is a strong AES-256 encryption, 4096-RSA authentication keys, personal DNS and port forwarding. The service also allows forwarding of all traffic from the VPN servers to Tor.

As for the uncommon features, ZorroVPN goes a step ahead of its competitors and offers TripleVPN and QuadroVPN. For comparison, most VPN service providers offer only DoubleVPN and some don’t offer even that. These multiple VPN chains add a much higher level of online protection and anonymity. Besides, they ensure that encrypted traffic is transmitted through the first server, the second server, and so on, until it reaches the last server in a chain.

Torrenting and P2P sharing aren’t a problem for the ZorroVPN users as the service provider offers full and unrestricted access to the Internet, VoIp, P2P and Torrent without any limitations on speed and traffic.

Users have ports 443 and 53 over TCP and UDP to connect to Zorro’s VPN servers. The provider also allows a transparent access to .onion and .bit resources while connected to the VPN.

The no-logs policy of ZorroVPN states that the company does not collect any “logs of IP address, bandwidth, connections, DNS requests and etc.” Unfortunately, that is all that you can get in terms of how the company uses your details in the “Terms of use” page and since these allegations have not been verified externally to date, we can only assume that they are true.

Price evaluation and customer support

The users of ZorroVPN can choose between several subscription options depending on the period that you want to subscribe for. You would have to pay $15 a month for a one-month access to the service. A 2-month payment would save you 17%  and will cost you $25 payable every two months.

You can enjoy bigger discounts if you subscribe for a longer period of time. The 6-month period, for example, will cost you $68, paid every six months, while the cheapest subscription will be if you purchase a one year service for $120 – this makes $10 a month. Up to five devices may be linked with one account.

While these prices may appear somewhat high, ZorroVPN provides ways of reducing them. You will get an exclusive deal and receive 20% for any order you make if you suggest the company to your mates. In fact, discount codes are also eligible for Black Friday occasions or holidays such as New Year.

A 7-day cash back policy is available for all the subscription plans. It guarantees that if you are not happy with the service, you will get your money back without questions. This is not a very long period in case you want to change your mind, especially when some of the competitors give you up to 45 days to test their service.  

Unlike its competitors, however, ZorroVPN gives you a lot of options to make a payment. You can choose between a variety of payment methods including Visa and Mastercard credit cards, PayPal, PerfectMoney, Yandex.Money, OKPay, Mint, and even cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Zcash, Monero, and Ethereum.  Our attempt to pay with a credit card, however, wasn’t very successful as we experienced an automatic redirect to the Mint website.

In case you need any assistance with setting up your VPN, customer support is available online via several methods. You can choose between filing up a web form, writing an e-mail to [email protected] or dropping a message through IMs as well as through remote support software such as TeamViewer. Getting a reply to your email, however, may take some time, so you have to arm yourself with some patience.

Browsing speed and user experience

ZorroVPN can be used on various devices and operating systems including Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and routers. Before you start using it, however, you should know that this is not a service intended for newbies. Therefore, you should be prepared that setting it up is not as simple as with other VPN providers. Most competitors usually have their own clients for download. Zorro VPN, however, doesn’t have its own VPN client and will require you to download and set up a third-party app such as OpenVPN or Viscosity on your device. All the details that you need on downloading and installing these applications are published in the vendor’s website and in case you are using other OS, there are other available apps. You will have access to your area on the ZorroVPN website as soon as your payment has been made.  

After installing a VPN client application, you will be required to download a configuration file for any VPN server you want to use (or all of them). The next step is to launch the VPN app, import the configuration server file and simply connect via the icon from the tray.

Our attempts to connect to servers based in Europe through the Open VPN GUI, however, weren’t very effective although the network status on the website indicated that the servers were “OK”. We tried also to connect to servers based in Asia, Africa and America, again without success. After sever unsuccessful attempts, we did managed to connect to one server in Eastern Europe, but the connection crashed after about 15 minutes and didn’t want to reconnect. The speed, however, was good and reached about 25Mbps.

When we tried the service with the Viscosity VPN client, the things were more positive. We managed to directly link to a server in the Middle East. Its speed wasn’t that great and reached just about 4Mbps, but, still, was a good start. We also were able to connect to a location in South Africa with a speed reaching more than 8Mbps. The highest speed of nearly 20Mbps we managed to get from a connection in Eastern Europe where we linked in a matter of seconds.

Streaming

Thanks to offering servers located in many countries around the world, the ZorroVPN provider supports streaming of certain content. FOX, Yandex Music, Spotify, Pandora, ivi.ru, and Hulu are the media resources that are accessible, but the major streaming players in the market such as Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Amazon Prime Video are not listed.

Are there other alternatives?

ZorroVPN pricing might be quite high for some people, thus, there is nothing wrong in checking other VPN services and their offerings before deciding on which provider to use. There are several alternatives that our team could suggest you to check out as a start, and here they are:

ExpressVPN is a VPN service with much affordable annual subscription plan of just $8.32 a month. They give you a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you are not happy and offer you a set of advanced features and extras for that money.

NordVPN is another alternative that has a powerful and even cheaper anonymity platform. For just $3.49 per month you can enjoy a 3 year period of subscription to VPN services.

Even cheaper than those two is the offering of CyberGhost which comes with a 3-year subscription for only $2.75 a month plus 45 days of money-back guarantee in case you aren’t satisfied with their service.

It should also be noted that these alternative VPN services allow you to watch Netflix and BBC iPlayer – something that ZorroVPN is not supporting to this date. In addition, they are much easier to set up and use since they offer user-friendly VPN clients for all main operating systems.

This being said, ZorroVPN has a lot to compete with, but if you are convinced about its advanced protection features and extras, go and give it a try.

Final words

ZorroVPN impresses with its advanced technologies and military-grade encryption protection. The service provides dedicated customer support in a number of ways, (including through TeamViewer) and offers a variety of comfortable payment methods. However, setting it up can be a hassle for a newbie since it doesn’t have a VPN client of its own. There are a number of streaming channels that you can access through ZorroVPN, but if you are looking for a way to unblock Netflix, BBC iPlayer or Amazon Prime Video with this service, you should better look elsewhere. Moreover, compared to competitor offerings, ZorroVPN’s price and money-back guarantee aren’t very appealing. Still, the service works well and is a reliable solution that is worth considering.