It’s just so cool when you can use the Internet without exposing your identity. Have you ever been thinking about how it would feel like if your online appearance looked like a ghost? In that case, there is no wonder why you’re so interested in a complete and detailed review of a VPN provider by the name of CyberGhost.
This provider has recently changed the owner company, and also added a bunch of servers, and their VPN applications for various platforms have also been greatly improved and updated. Now is the time for me and you to have a thorough inspection of what this provider has to offer as of the beginning of 2021. It is important to know if CyberGhost is good enough to be considered your VPN of choice in 2021.
Having that said, it’s better to have a complete review of this provider from different points of view. In this comprehensive article, I will try and answer a set of most important questions you would ask when deciding if CyberGhost is worth trying. Without any further due, let’s begin with a brief history of this provider and the location of their offices.
What is CyberGhost VPN, and where is it located?
CyberGhost is based in Romania. After more than 8 years of its history, this provider has reached a customer base of more than 30 million users all over the world. The main office is headquartered in Bucharest. Software development teams are located mostly in Germany.
I must say – you are getting a very nice union of strong privacy and outstanding software quality. Germany is known as a hub for IT professionals. Romania on the other hand – is among the most benign locations for VPN services.
The thing is, Romania is not obliged by any international surveillance treaties. In other words, the country is located outside of 5, 9, 14 or any other “eyes” agreements, and is not going to share your personal data or identity with any government or other organizations.
Romania is considered one of the best places for a VPN provider to exist. Among the other countries like the British Virgin Islands, Panama, and Switzerland, this would be your best bet if you are really concerned with privacy.
Besides that, CyberGhost upholds a credo of placing user’s privacy in the first and the most important place.
The company actively fights against Internet censorship and online people’s rights. They also publish the Transparency Reports every few years, to help their customers understand how secure they are. But, we’ll talk about it a bit later.
If you really want to know more about CyberGhost and its team, I suggest you visit their official web-site’s “About us” section. I must say, they share the most detailed bio of their team I’ve ever seen with any other companies alike.
Now, for the other questions about the CyberGhost.
How many devices can be connected with one account?
CyberGhost has a special approach when it comes to your privacy. Nowadays, most of us don’t just use a single Internet-connected device. Besides the desktop PC, you most likely also use additional devices and gadgets, starting from a laptop, all the way down to the smart-watch devices.
Why not install a VPN on all of them? This may sound like something cost-inefficient or simply expensive to you. Yes, with some VPN providers you would need to pay an additional amount each month to support multiple devices. Usually, you will get from 1 to 10 devices. The more you want – the more you will have pay.
With that said, CyberGhost offers one of the best simultaneous connection offers on a VPN market. You can use up to 7 devices with one and only VPN account! Isn’t this great?
Let’s continue with other aspects, and the most important one for any VPN would be anonymity.
Is CyberGhost VPN completely anonymous?
CyberGhost claims to be a zero-logs VPN provider. Indeed, in their privacy policy, they swear not to keep your identity exposing logs such as:
- your IP address
- your exact location (only the country is tracked)
- a history of your browsing
- DNS requests you made
Of course, there is no way for you to check whether those claims are true or false. Nevertheless, it is good to have such a strong no-logging policy put in place. After all, no respected VPN provider would ever breach their own policies.
Besides not storing the usage logs, CyberGhost is all open for anonymous payments. In other words, you can pay for your subscription via the Bitcoin wallet. You are even backed by the same strong 45 days refund policy, in case of using cryptocurrency payment methods.
Transparency reports and other actions to boost your privacy
CyberGhost also publishes transparency reports to display the legal request statistics for every single quarter. These requests include copyright infringement complaints, police requests, malicious activity, and DDoS attack investigation requests. CyberGhost would always stick to their cyber-security protection guidelines, and never allow anyone to get your personal data.
Privacy hub with a huge knowledge base
CyberGhost takes online freedom very seriously. They’ve even created and keeping always up-to-date a special section on their site, called the “Privacy hub”. There you can find a lot of useful information, tutorials, guides, and tips on how to stay safe online.
You are going to find all the information regarding the surveillance and espionage of your online activity, and how to protect against them. There is also a bunch of the latest content regarding online services anonymity issues (social networks and portals). As well as digital freedom and Internet privacy materials you will definitely find useful.
What data does CyberGhost track?
There is a bunch of information that CyberGhost tracks, though. You must be aware of that, prior to getting the subscription. Namely, they do collect the following data:
- email address (this is needed for a password reset, and you can always use a special anonymous email for that)
- payment information (this is required in case you request a refund)
- cookie preferences (needed for marketing purposes, and customer support, but you can always disable cookies or use the anonymous mode in your browser)
- approximate country location, website usage, and IP address are only tracked when you create your account (all the information is stored in an anonymous format and is not associated with your further activities with the actual VPN service)
- meta-data of your device (operating system, browser version, etc. only when using the website)
- successful connection events (they track it to estimate VPN server loads and make sure each user is getting the best user experience)
Which security and encryption mechanisms do they use?
CyberGhost takes the encryption strength seriously. After many years of experience, having a team of the best cybersecurity professionals, they’ve developed a strong data encryption strategy. At the moment, all of your VPN traffic is protected by the following:
- AES 256-bit for every piece of data (governments and armed forces have widely adopted this encryption algorithm and it is really a rock-solid)
- OpenVPN protocol – is the most secure VPN protocol as of now, and is pretty much a must-have for any respected VPN provider
- Integrated Firewall – renders it impossible for any other program to bypass the VPN tunnel (every application is enforced to exchange the data only via the CyberGhost’s servers)
- 4096-bit RSA key and SHA256 are used for the authentication
- Perfect forward secrecy via the ECDH-4096 key exchange
- IPv6 leak protection
- WebRTC leak protection
As you can see, CyberGhost uses a nice selection of industry-standard encryption and privacy protection technologies. It is also good to know they have all the technologies combined and working in tandem. This makes it nearly impossible for any data breach to happen with this provider.
How many servers does CyberGhost offer?
Currently, you can access 5700+ VPN servers located in 89+ countries across the world. All the main countries and cities are covered with a decent selection of servers. Most of the countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia are included.
The best selection of servers is of course available in the most popular VPN locations. US, UK, Canada, and Switzerland are literally stuffed with servers.
Whatever your purpose and favorite location for the VPN is, all your needs should be covered with such a huge set of servers. With the acquisition of ZenMate VPN – there are even more servers available than before. CyberGhost keeps adding new locations every few months too. This makes it possible to easily find the fastest server, and also use this VPN for streaming (will talk about it later in this article).
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Which platforms are supported?
It would be much easier to name those platforms not supported by CyberGhost. Indeed platform’s diversity of this provider is simply astonishing. Among the supported devices and OSs are the following:
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- iOS
- Android
- Chrome extension
- Firefox extension
- Android TV
- Amazon Fire Stick
- Routers
- Other devices (Raspberry Pi, Synology, NAS…) via OpenVPN profiles
There should be no problems for you to install and start using the CyberGhost with any modern device. In most cases, you will be just fine using their desktop or mobile apps, as those are very user friendly and nice looking.
In case you want to route the entire home’s traffic via the VPN – a simple solution is to set-up the CyberGhost VPN on any of the supported router models.
How good is the CyberGhost application? What features and options are included?
I personally really enjoyed testing the desktop VPN app for Windows. The UI is slick and is easy to get started with. Someone might dislike the right side docking window style, but you can always expand it to make it full-sized and browse all the servers and settings.
Speaking of settings, there is a bunch of options that you can control and modify. Here is the list of the most important ones:
- Protocol selection (OpenVPN, IKEv2, L2TP)
- TCP or UDP connection
- Random connection port selection (allows you to use the VPN in airports or hotels Wi-Fi that restricts certain ports)
- DNS leak protection
- IPv6 leak protection
- Automatic kill-switch
There is also a “Smart Rules” menu section that allows you to adjust the following options:
- Auto-start on system boot
- Auto-connect on start
- Auto-launch an app of your choice after a VPN connection is established (could be your favorite browser or a torrent client)
- Select a Wi-Fi network that must automatically be protected by a VPN, or completely disable a VPN for certain networks
- Use exceptions – bypass the VPN tunnel for certain sites
- App protection – allows CyberGhost to start itself automatically and connect to a server whenever the app of your choice starts (browser, torrent app, etc.)
Last but not least – the “Connection Features” menu section. It includes all the advanced connection settings you may want and may don’t want to use. Among those are:
- Adblocker
- Malicious websites blocker
- Online tracking blocker
- Automatic redirect to HTTPS websites – will enforce any website to work in HTTPS mode if it supports it – can cause the unprotected site to not work at all – for your own good (use this option with caution)
- Data compression – server-side traffic compression to make it possible of using the slow Internet connection, or reduce the traffic cost (useful for mobile networks)
Is CyberGhost fast?
The speed of the incoming and outgoing transfer is one of the most important aspects of any VPN provider. This is the first indicator for me to say “no” or “maybe yes” when testing the different VPNs.
It is much better to see once than to hear a hundred times. Hence, kindly take a look into the speed test results for the CyberGhost VPN yourself.
As you may have noticed, CyberGhost provides very consistent speeds across the globe. Even the most distant locations like Australia and Korea indicated very decent results. Still,I couldn’t find any provider that beats the ExpressVPN in terms of speed.
Keep in mind, though, the pricing plans are significantly different for CyberGhost, compared to ExpressVPN. With CyberGhost you are getting much better deals overall, and it works just fine if top-speeds are not your major requirement.
Overall, I would recommend the CyberGhost as one of the fastest VPNs, and most importantly – the one that offers very stable results with different servers and countries.
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How much does CyberGhost cost?
The price of the CyberGhost goes in descending order depending on the billing period you choose. Here is the list of available pricing options:
- The most valuable deal for you – is to get their 3-years plan with an 80% discount. You are going to pay just $99 for the entire period, which equals $2.75 per month.
- 2-years plan offers a smaller discount. Overall you are going to pay $88.56 for the entire billing period, or $3.69 per month. It really makes more sense to get a 3-years plan if you are aiming for a 2-years one already.
- The 1-year plan is the last one that offers a discount. You are going to pay $71.88 per year which is the same as $5.99 every month. No the best deal so far, but could work for some of you.
- One month’s plan is the most expensive, and no discount is offered here. You will have to pay a full price of $12.99 if you decide to be billed monthly.
I am not a huge fan of providers that are trying to make me stay with them longer. For example, ExpressVPN does not offer any other plans but 1-year or 1-month only. But, if all you want is to get a decent VPN provider for a few years in a pay-and-forget manner – CyberGhost is something worth trying.
By the way, they also offer a short trial period, but, I will bring more details later in this article.
Can CyberGhost unblock the streaming?
Netflix US and other streaming services unblocking is a really a painful topic for most VPN providers. Luckily, with CyberGhost this problem is solved forever.
The best thing about this VPN, is they have a bunch of servers optimized for streaming. For streaming not only Netflix but also services like:
- Amazon Prime
- HBO Now
- Hulu
- NBC
- BBC iPlayer
- Fox
- Disney
- and more…
Here you can see how Netflix US’s only, Supernatural TV show got unblocked for me when using CyberGhost’s “streaming services” feature.
Is CyberGhost good for torrenting?
While a lot of VPN providers are either not designed for torrenting or even block this popular usage of their servers, this is not the case with CyberGhost.
Lucky for you and anyone else who wants to take advantage of this convenient file sharing method, CyberGhost 100% allows usage of the torrent protocol.
It doesn’t just allow torrenting, it actually highlights this feature in their desktop application. There is a special server list in there, called “For torrenting”.
Now, you can be sure your torrent usage stays completely anonymous. The P2P transfer is going to be fast to thanks to the torrent-optimized server list. Your ISP’s torrent throttling is going to be bypassed forever.
How about the money-back guarantee?
CyberGhost provides you with one of the longest and most honest refund policies. You are getting 14 days money-back guarantee for a monthly plan, and whopping 45 days for longer plans starting from one year!
The best thing is they are giving you a bullet-proof no questions asked money-back guarantee. No matter which servers you were using and for how long. Disregarding how much traffic you have consumed – you will get your payment back.
They even cover those accounts paid via Bitcoin with the same standard refund policy. This is just so cool and honest from this provider. I call it – a 100% risk-free anonymity!
Bottom line. Can CyberGhost be trusted?
There are some rumors of CyberGhost’s parent company being responsible for spreading malware. In fact, the “Crossrider” has been working to make adware in the past. Later on, the company got renamed, and is currently called the “Kape Technologies”, claiming to completely change their business model, and going away from the Ad Tech industry.
Can we consider CyberGhost as dangerous, and does it bring malware to our systems? There are no reasons for that. Even though the parent company has been working on creating some sort of Adware in the past – it has nothing to do with the spreading of the malware. If that were the case – your antivirus program would most certainly trigger an alarm.
What we have now, is a paid VPN provider owned by a bigger company, and they are currently working in the opposite direction. Instead of harming the user’s privacy – they are protecting it. Who else could give you greater privacy protection, than those who actually worked on the opposite side?
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To add even more assurance – do not forget where the headquarters are located. Romania is considered one of the best countries in terms of privacy protection laws.
The VPN we are talking about also makes it clear how they prevent any cybersecurity threats from government organizations by publishing the transparency reports every few months (every quarter to be exact). There is no reason not to trust CyberGhost with your privacy unless proven otherwise.
