BulletVPN Review – How Reliable is this Provider in 2019?

BulletVPN is registered and operates from Estonia; a country that is well outside the surveillance of the “14-eye countries”. Estonia is also not obligated to data sharing with any invasive superpower – something that favors BulletVPN to keep a strict no-logs policy. The VPN’s main selling points include superb speeds, as well as top-notch privacy and security. Their ability to overcome popular streaming sites such as Netflix US is fantastic. BulletVPN is also an excellent option for torrenting, thanks to its P2P support feature. Finally, while they might not be a top VPN in the industry, they’re certainly among the best mid-range VPNs – but that is not enough praise for this exciting service. Therefore, here’s a full review of BulletVPN’s service.

We’ve been testing with BulletVPN for weeks, and throughout that time we collected and validated every information before publishing. Moreover, in this BulletVPN review, we promise honesty and clear-cut information that you need to know about the Estonia-based VPN. Please stick with us to learn more.

Pricing and payment options

BulletVPN sells three subscription plans that offer the same features but vary in their billing cycles. Compared to other mid-range VPNs, these prices are about average. Equally, the pricing of the packages improves with the length of the billing cycle. 

In this review, we looked at the individual plans, and here’s how they compare:

• The 1 Month Plan: goes for $10.98 monthly, and it’s currently the most expensive package of the three. Therefore, not recommended considering the other plans have much better offers.
• The 6 Months plan: goes for $9.16 per month and is billed $54.98 every six months. Since this plan can save up to 17% of your money, it’s only recommended if you need to use the VPN for less than a year.
• The 1 Year plan: sells at $3.75 monthly. Notably, you’ll be billed $89.98 every 24 months, thanks to the additional 1-year free subscription once you purchase the plan. You’ll also save up to 66% of your money when you subscribe to the annual plan. Therefore, this is the most recommendable and most affordable plan if you want BulletVPN.

Unfortunately, the 1-month package is somewhat pricey, while the annual plan is a little above average as well. Otherwise, for every plan you purchase, BulletVPN covers you with a risk-free 30-days money-back guarantee. This is sufficient time to try the VPN before you commit to their service. If you end up not liking their service, you can cancel the subscription anytime within the first 30 days, and receive your refund – no questions asked.

Note: BulletVPN has a continued impressive culture where it offers different discount codes every time – 66% discount at the time of this review. The discount codes only pop up on the official site the first time you visit. 

Payment methods

BulletVPN has also partnered with both McAfee, and Security Metrics, to accept various payment methods, including all major credit cards, PayPal, BitPay, eWallets, Bitcoin, and more. Nonetheless, our major highlight was the Bitcoin option, which lets you make anonymous payments, thereby keeping your identity concealed.

Servers

 

BulletVPN offers a relatively limited network of servers, but well distributed in most parts of the world – regardless the number is perpetually rising. At the time of this review, their live server count was 76 well distributed in 41 countries around the globe.

Moreover, if you find your target location is not supported, BulletVPN encourages you to request for coverage in that region. While the VPN has concentrated its servers in popular areas like the US, Europe, and Asia/Pacific, they have also gone miles to diversify to other regions of the world. That includes the Middle East, Africa, and few territories in South America – Brazil and Mexico.

Nonetheless, our extreme delight was the efficiency of the servers as they offered blazing fast speeds. Thanks to this, we could stream various digital content in HD without playback issues, and dozens of online games without lags. 

Features

Alongside security, privacy, and the ability to unblock restricted content, a VPN’s features are an added value. The more it can offer, the more interesting and helpful it can be to an online user. BulletVPN offers a bunch of those, some of them are even exclusive to the provider itself.

Kill Switch

BulletVPN offers an automatic kill switch. It’s a feature that will block all incoming and outgoing internet traffic on your device whenever the VPN connection drops. That is a must-have feature if you wish to stay secure at all times – especially torrent lovers, streamers, and those accessing data in highly censored countries. If it’s not present, your data will slip to your ISP’s servers the moment the VPN connection blacks out.

If you want to activate this feature, simply launch the BulletVPN app. head over to Settings, and flick the button next to it.

Bullet Shield

Bullet Shield is another excellent feature to protect a user’s privacy. While a kill switch cuts off your internet access, BulletShield steps in to prevent you from connecting to your internet if a VPN connection is not on.

That way, you’re ensured security and anonymity all the time. When I was trying to activate this feature, I noticed that it cannot be turned on without having the kill switch already activated. In other words, if the kill switch is not on, the Bullet Shield button won’t budge.

You’ll also find the Bullet Shield option in the Settings section. Just turn the kill switch on, and then enable Bullet Shield.

Smart DNS Proxy

BulletVPN also provides a Smart DNS Proxy that can be used to go around geo-restrictions on devices that don’t support native VPN clients. Such platforms include gaming consoles – PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch – Apple TV, and Smart TVs, and more.

However, bear in mind that a smart DNS proxy can only overcome geo-blocking. It can’t match the benefits offered by a VPN, including security, and other privacy features. There’s also a good side to that.

As a constant streamer, you’ll be looking for good speeds for watching HD content. Smart DNS does not encrypt your data, so you’ll be accessing geo-restricted content with minimal speed loss.

VPN Protocols

BulletVPN offers an extended range of connection protocols that you can benefit from. The VPN provides a choice between OpenVPN, L2TP, PPTP, IKEv2, and IKEv1. Although L2TP and PPTP are excellent for giving you fast speeds, they also score poorly in terms of privacy and protection. However, both OpenVPN and IKEv2 are your best bets if you are looking for an excellent balance in blazing fast speeds and top-notch privacy and security.

Privacy and Security

Security and privacy are the leading factors when you’re looking for a VPN. If it doesn’t offer robust features, it’s not doing its job. That’s why we assessed what BulletVPN is capable of in that department and came up with the following:

Privacy

BulletVPN has its headquarters in Estonia where it’s registered and operates from. This is an excellent location to base a VPN considering Estonia is a country outside the 14 eye countries and doesn’t have obligatory data retention laws. And while you may read reports claiming Estonia violates privacy laws, their recent constitutional changes confirm our statement. 

Furthermore, BulletVPN in their privacy policy, they say:

“BulletVPN does not collect logs of any user activity, nor can it link any other collected information to any specific user. We do not collect any logs of user browsing history, connection history, traffic and data transfer, or DNS queries, nor do we store VPN connection logs of any type.”

This means that BulletVPN observes a firm zero logs policy – something that every top VPN should keep. Thanks to this, BulletVPN can’t share your information to authorities if a legal request is made.

Security

As for security, BulletVPN uses the best-in-class encryption techniques, including the advanced AES 256-bit encryption. They also use the SHA-512 in conjunction with an RSA 4096-bit key for data authentication. This level of security is usually graded as “military-grade,” and it’s the highest level of protection you can get.

BulletVPN also provides you with several protocols to choose from depending on the client app you’re using. You can select your preferred protocol on the Settings page of your current client. You can choose from either OpenVPN, L2TP, PPTP, IKEv2, or IKEv1.

Unfortunately, BulletVPN lacks a built-in kill switch, and DNS & IPv6 leak protection features. However, since BulletVPN also offers a Smart DNS proxy, we think that the VPN might even provide some leak protection features as well.

Performance

BulletVPN excelled in our performance test. In this review, we majored our analysis on speed, reliability, security, and efficiency. Admittedly, while the VPN did well in all the other categories, we had to perform an actual speed test to verify the level of speeds BulletVPN offers. 

Speed test

We carried out several speed tests using a reputable online speed test tool. Bear in mind that we conducted our initial speed test without a VPN – to allow us to obtain a baseline for the remaining tests.

First test without a VPN connection:

This is the baseline result after testing without a VPN connection.

Second test while connected to a US server:

In this speed test, there was a slight drop in speeds compared to our baseline result. 

Third test while connected to a nearby server:

The result we recorded when we connected to a UK server was also a slight reduction of the baseline speeds. Furthermore, these results we almost similar to those of the US one but with better speed performance.

We were thrilled with the speed test results we observed when we connected to remote servers. The level of speeds BulletVPN offers when connected to distant servers is quite sufficient to stream HD content and torrent various material as well.

Looking at the speed test results we obtained, we think that BulletVPN performs well in terms of speeds as well. This means that you can rely on the VPN to stream and torrent your favorite content while getting one of the best-in-class encryption and privacy protection.

Ease of Use

BulletVPN has made significant improvements on its official website, giving it a new makeover. When you navigate to the official site, you’re met with a dark-grey theme, with a touch of green. At the top menu bar, you’ll find well-placed links that can lead you to various useful pages like support, pricing, apps, contact as well as account. Scrolling down the home page, you’ll observe multiple information that’s knowledgeable about BulletVPN. The footer sports multiple, useful links as well.

Getting started

You can subscribe to any BulletVPN plan by clicking on the “Get BulletVPN” green button to proceed. You’ll be re-routed to a subscription page, where you’ll be required to follow these easy steps:

• Select your preferred plan
• Enter your email and password
• Choose your preferred payment method (preferably, Bitcoin)
• Download the client, install, run and connect to get started

BulletVPN Clients

BulletVPN has dedicated apps to almost every major device out there. That includes the likes of Android, iOS, PC, Mac, Fire Stick, and Fire TV. The clients are user-friendly and so easy to operate. Here are a few samples.

Desktop client

BulletVPN offers a desktop client that is similar in design for both the Windows and macOS platforms. The client has a sleek, well-labeled, and premium design that is is easy to use. Once you launch the app, you’re required to enter your login details to proceed.

You can get started by clicking Connect, and the client will connect you to the best available server. However, you can choose to connect manually by tapping on the displayed server name to select your target server location. The app has categorized its server locations into three tabs, including the recommended, all, and favorite lists.

You can also access the Settings window, where you can tweak a couple setting options under Connections, VPN Protocols, as well as the OpenVPN Protocols. 

Noteworthy, the desktop app requires you to disconnect before you connect to a different server – that’s if you were already connected. It takes less than five seconds to connect and disconnect from a server. Overly, our experience with the desktop client was seamless.

Mobile app

The mobile app has a similar user interface to its desktop counterparts, but different in the design outlook. Thankfully, the mobile app for both the iOS and Android platforms is the same. To use the mobile client, you’ll need the same knowledge used to operate the desktop app.

Just like the desktop version, you’re required to enter your login details at the startup to proceed. The app is much simplified in design. All the useful functionalities are at the base of the app. All BulletVPN dedicated apps have a built-in feature that can auto-connect you to the best available server with a single click on the Connect button.

Similarly, you can choose to connect manually by tapping on the search icon at the base of the app. In particular, we were very impressed with the Sort feature that allows you to filter either by Country or the Load of available servers. Thanks to this feature, you can settle on the server with the best speeds and performance without hustling.

Unluckily, the Settings page of the mobile app is limited to a few features. Notably, the app doesn’t have useful features like a kill switch, but you can benefit from the available connection protocols – IPSec/IKEv1, and IKEv2.

Compatibility

Having a VPN account is not enough if you don’t have the device that supports it. If you’re using the likes Roku, Apple TV, Smart TV, PlayStation, and Chromecast, you won’t find any compatible BulletVPN client. So, here’s a quick look at what devices you can use BulletVPN on and what services/websites you can unblock using this provider.

Compatibility with platforms and devices

BulletVPN has recently diversified in terms of the platforms and devices supported – something that has given it a competing edge against its competitors. At the time of this review, BulletVPN offers apps for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. 

If you want to share a BulletVPN connection with unsupported devices, you can easily get the client on compatible routers. Also, you can download the application on your PC or Mac and turn them into virtual routers.

That way, whatever device is connected to the network will benefit from what the VPN has to offer, circumventing the concurrent devices limit of three.

Compatibility with streaming and torrenting

BulletVPN works perfectly with Netflix US. We connected to various US servers including Atlanta, and they all unblocked the vast library of movies and TV Shows available on the Netflix US version.

We were also delighted to learn the VPN unblocks other giant streaming outlets such as Hulu, and Amazon Prime as well. Sadly, we were unable to stream the digital content on BBC iPlayer – somehow, the site could detect that we were not actually in the UK despite the use of BulletVPN.

BulletVPN is also an excellent choice for torrenting considering it supports P2P. We tried to download content through various popular torrenting sites, and they all worked well. In any case, BulletVPN considers itself as the perfect provider for torrenting and P2P file sharing.

Bypassing Censorship

During one of our email conversations with the folks at BulletVPN, they confirmed to us that BulletVPN currently works in China. It means that if you can use BulletVPN to bypass the Great Firewall of China, then you can access censored sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and more.

Customer support

Regrettably, the customer support offered by BulletVPN is not that reliable, and we feel that they can improve on their service delivery. Otherwise, they provide a wide range of documentation, including Setup Guides, Troubleshooting Guides, and FAQs. They also have a search bar that you can use to quick-search a topic of interest.

The VPN offers a live chat service on their website, but it’s not available all the time. Sadly, the site hasn’t included their active hours of service on the live chat tool. Nonetheless, you can if you have an issue that requires personal assistance, you can reach them via email ticketing. It takes them up to an hour to revert, but once they get to your ticket, the agent will stay with you until you land a solution.

Bottom Line

You now have a full review of the BulletVPN service. Now, here’s a quick look at everything there is about the provider:

Conclusion

BulletVPN makes up the list of the best VPNs for streaming and torrenting, thanks to its superb speeds. The VPN is also located in Estonia, a region that favors them to observe a strict zero-logs policy. The Estonia-based service also offers affordable paid plans – that’s if you opt for the long-term options. Their platform and device compatibility is also incredible, and its client apps are easy-to-use.

Sadly, the VPN has limited server locations but maintains an impressive locational distribution around the world. They also have a weak customer support system, which we’d love for them to improve. However, their emailing ticketing system is reliable, considering the agents can provide solutions.

Otherwise, ultimately, it’s down to you to decide if they’re an excellent fit for your online needs. Let me know your personal verdict in the comment section below.