Nord VPN is quickly becoming one of the most popular, if not already the most popular, VPN services, and has earned a reputation for being one of the most reliable in the market. While NordVPN operates globally, its headquarters are in Panama, outside the jurisdiction of Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen eyes, meaning Nord VPN will never be at the mercy of governments demanding it divulge any data. For those that are extra paranoid about the possibility of somebody waving their credentials and seizing Nord's data, their headquarters of choice make it all but impossible. Not that there's any data to acquire anyway.
That's another beautiful thing about Nord; they have a zero log policy. Meaning that there is truly no record of its customers various exploits. And you can rest assured said exploits will not be spied upon in real-time either. NordVPN’s OpenVPN clients use an AES-256-GCM cipher and HMAC SHA256 hash authentication. Additionally, NordVPN utilizes Perfect Forward Secrecy through a DHE-4096 key exchange. The AES-256-GCM cipher is also used to encrypt traffic with the IPSec/IKEv2 protocol. If you can't translate all that fancy IT lingo, it basically means Nord upholds the highest standards of data encryption.
The selection of servers is vast, offering more than 5,000 global servers in 60 countries. This is the largest number of servers of any VPN we've reviewed. You'll never have to worry about excessive lag due to distance. From just about anywhere on the globe, you'll find some local Nord servers to link to. Speed tests conducted by third party reviewers continue to demonstrate Nord's impressive latency ( or should I say lack thereof, ) and download speeds. Local latency's are practically indistinguishable from direction connection, and even server son the opposite side of the globe tend to test in the low 100ms range. And it's difficult to find Nord servers that test below 300mbps/s, despite their proximity to the user. This is impressive, to put it mildly, and simply melts most of the competition. Even the double VPNs perform better than many of Nord's competitor's single VPNs.
Nord also features some handy features like a skill switch, and ad blocker, tracker blocker and malicious site blocker. It has fully featured mobile apps for android and iOS. Nord tends to work well with Netflix and many other popular streaming services. It's download speeds make it ideal for torrent services. NordVPN offers several options for customer service, like a 24/7 live chat, email support and an in-depth database of submitted user questions to leaf through. There's no live phone support, but the chat support is so good, that you'll never feel worse off for it.
Nord VPN appears to the the most secure, best performing, and best all-around VPN on the market. It's definitely our top pick. Don't take our word for it, though. Scope out the reviews. NordVPN racked up an impressive 4.6 star rating on the App Store, with over 60,000 ratings. It did nearly as well in the Google Play Store, with 132,871 reviews averaging 4.4/5 stars. If you had any doubts that VPN delivers, that should put them to rest.
