Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking Fast-forward to more recent times, and Hola VPN is now offering a couple of premium versions. While Hola VPN gets some things right with its premium version, it leaves a lot to be desired in key areas, particularly in comparison to its peers. For this review, I used Hola Premium, which has the most expensive monthly pricing of all the VPNs I’ve reviewed. To find decent value, you basically have to opt for the three-year version. Alternatively, pay an even higher fee for monthly, annual or triennial options for Hola Ultra to access “Ultra Fast” speeds (useless for anyone in Australia with 100Mbps or slower), 20 simultaneous connections and, reportedly, the option to select specific server locations. Signing into the Hola portal in a browser presents a diverse list of popular sites, supposedly the top ones in Australia. It’s not surprising to see Netflix there, but there are also other regions like Hulu and BBC, not to mention more nefarious sites like The Pirate Bay. Speaking of torrents, Hola VPN didn’t work at all with peer-to-peer software in my tests. Clicking on one of these popular sites opens it and gives you a prompt to access it with a particular compatible VPN server, which is a nice touch. But you can just use the Windows software instead for greater control that’s not reliant on a Hola browser portal. By default, Hola VPN starts with Windows and, frustratingly, there’s no way to stop that in the settings, plus it requires both the software and Hola Background Services to run in your system tray. Whether you’re connecting automatically or manually selecting servers, it takes around 15 seconds to connect. Comparatively, that’s a long time to wait, and it’s an absolute killer for real-time services, including music streaming. It was so bad in my tests that streaming music sometimes wouldn’t start playing again. Outside of visible server load, manually selecting servers is pointless, given Hola Premium doesn’t display regions. Reportedly, you need to pay for Hola Ultra to connect to specific locations, which is a feature I’ve never seen paywalled in other premium VPNs. There’s also some confusion over how many servers and countries there are: the website claims there are 1,000+ servers in 218 countries, but my manual counts within Hola VPN were 399 and 42, respectively. Smart DNS is also how Hola justifies device support for consoles, including the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. But a Smart DNS isn’t the same as a native VPN app. Those with a Keenetic Ultra router can also configure it to work with Hola VPN. The only impressive thing Hola VPN has going on in terms of devices is the 10 simultaneous connections for Hola Premium and the 20 that come with Hola Ultra. Meanwhile, the table below paints a picture of how Hola VPN should theoretically work with your NBN connection. By using the fastest available download speeds of the plans in our comparison engine, the table uses the best-case 19% and 65% hits to download speed (from my tests) for US and UK servers, respectively. The three right columns show the number of simultaneous streaming per connection. Note that Hulu and BBC iPlayer have options for unlimited streams while Netflix maxes out at four. While it’s not practical to stream dozens of streams in a home, it does give an idea of how much a VPN can slow a connection.
