HolaVPN is a service provided by Hola Networks Limited, which is out of Israel.
If we had any household names in the VPN industry, Hola VPN would probably be among them. It’s been around since 2012 and boasts of having served more than 200 million users ever since. It presents itself as the foremost P2P VPN in the industry. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s the best thing.
This P2P thing doesn’t mean you’re in the best torrent VPN. It means that your internet access becomes a P2P resource. Let me explain it further.
A typical premium VPN service charges you a fee, and that’s how it pays its bills and stays in business. On the other hand, free VPNs collect your online data for sale to data mining companies. Unfortunately, Hola’s business model is not exactly either of those. The network is not supported by the members’ fees but by imposing dubious practices that are far from secure for its users.
Let’s start at the beginning. In Hola, you have to share your bandwidth with other users on the VPN. So your IP address won’t be hidden from the world at all. Instead, it will be shown as somebody else’s address – another user in the Hola network, and vice versa; your IP will be reported as somebody else’s. That’s what a peer-to-peer VPN is.
HolaVPN is very committed to its P2P VPN model. P2P in VPN networks is a novel thing for sure, but does it bring any value to you as a user? Is it just an intelligent managerial move that’s good for the company and risky for you?
As I stated earlier, the business model in HolaVPN is unusual. The service is offered as freemium (you don’t pay for it with money), but you can sign up for the Plus package and receive additional features. As we continue exploring Hola’s features, let’s remember something: in the digital world, you are the product for sure whenever you don’t have to pay for a product with money. So let’s investigate a little deeper.
The P2P VPN thing is the most peculiar thing about HolaVPN by far, but it’s not the only thing I don’t like about it. For example, one of the most frequent questions I always look to answer about any VPN is: does HolaVPN work with Netflix? Well, it doesn’t, and it’s not a point in its favor.