BTGuard
Overall User Rating – (Jump to user reviews)
Website: www.btguard.com
Price: $9.95 / Month
Our Rating: – 65%
Protection: 4/5
Software / GUI: 3/5
Features: 3/5
Speed: 2.5/5
Ease of Use: 5/5
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Service Overview and Reviews
Service: BTGuard comes in two flavors (and prices):-
As a Bittorrent Proxy – BTGuard’s paid proxy service ($6.95 / Month), through which you pass your download traffic, hides the IP-addresses of its users from the public and any tracking will see the BTGuard IP address rather than your own and therefore your identity effectively stays hidden from view.
As a VPN Service – BTGuard’s VPN service ($9.95 / Month), operates much like any other VPN, securing your internet connection and rendering your web browsing and other net services anonymous. The server network is limited to Canada, Netherlands(EU) and Singapore so pick the nearest server to your location, P2P downloads should then be at least reliable and secure.
Privacy: BTGuard does not log customer IP addresses or customer usage. See their Policy/Terms/FAQ
Our Thoughts: We tested the VPN service (not the proxy service) and it’s a basic, no frills affair. Set-up is easy and BTGuard works via the standard OpenVPN GUI. However, we found connecting via PPTP instead slightly increased the server speeds. We also found the Canada server very overloaded and slow at times and experienced more consistent results connecting via the EU server.
If only occasional/light P2P file sharing is your thing the EU server should work ok. However, if you are looking for more, you may find the limited server network restricting (For example, it’s no good for US or UK online TV network streaming).
See our Best VPN for Torrents
Disclaimer: Know the laws in your country and locality. BestVPNForYou.com do not suggest, condone, or practice the violation of national or international copyright law. That being said, we do support fundamental reforms of copyright laws as proposed by the Pirate Party political and activist organizations around the world.
BTGuard User Reviews
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Please rate BTGuard from your own experience via the form at the bottom of this page.
BTGuard Speed Test Results
BTGuard Speed Test
Below you can see our testing results for BTGuard. For more details of how we conduct our speed tests go to VPN Speed Tests.
Test PC #1 – United States – OS (Mac OSX) – ISP (Cox)
| SpeedTest.net (Chromium) | Location | Ping | Download | Upload |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 24 | 22.53 | 7.2 |
| PPTP | EU | 166 | 4.14 | 2.99 |
| PPTP | Canada | 101 | 1.24 | 1.33 |
| Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 620M | 1841K | 05:44 |
| PPTP | EU | 620M | 520K | 20:19 |
| P2P Test (Transmission) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United States | 729.1Mb | 1.58Mb | 07:41 |
| PPTP | EU | 729.1Mb | 0.73Mb | 16:20 |
| PPTP | Canada | 729.1Mb | 0.27Mb | 45:09 |
Test PC #2 – United Kingdom – OS (Win 7) – ISP (Sky)
| SpeedTest.net (Firefox) | Location | Ping | Download | Upload |
| Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 32 | 10.56 | 0.94 |
| OpenVPN | EU | 41 | 9.94 | 0.84 |
| Download Test (Curl) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 620M | 1241k | 09:00 |
| OpenVPN | EU | 620M | 1174k | 12:01 |
| P2P Test (uTorrent) | Location | File Size | Av. Speed/sec | Time/mins |
| Not Using VPN | United Kingdom | 695Mb | 1.1Mb | 10:22 |
| OpenVPN | EU | 695Mb | 1.0Mb | 11:05 |
Tips: If you’re having trouble with connecting, but not actually seeing your IP address change, try checking the option in your VPN settings to “use the VPN for all traffic” (or similar wording). That isn’t specified in some of the instructions and we had this trouble in a couple instances with PPTP connections. Checking that solved the problem.
The Canada server seems to be under heavy load and a bit slow.
PPTP via their EU server seems to have the best and most consistent speeds, especially from the US. We found that OpenVPN seems to sacrifice performance quite a bit when connecting from the US. In Europe though, OpenVPN still seems to provide great speeds when connecting to the EU server.
Note: The handshake protocol (MSCHAP_V2) used by many PPTP connections has been cracked and therefore PPTP could now be considered unencrypted. For maximum security use OpenVPN or L2TP.
I tried, uTorrent, BitTorrent BitComet and could not get any of these working w/BTGuard — even after finding the setup screens on their web site. There are many other people out there that cannot get BTGuard to work with these programs, so I don’t feel so bad. I was about to give up on the FIFTH day of wasting time, but I decided to try a couple more things. I actually stumbled onto a combination of settings that worked. Trial and Error my friends. Too bad there is absolutely no support from the web site.
It would get top marks across the board if it didn’t constantly drop it’s service all the time without notification. It gives a false sense of security.
Like you I found the default set-up slowing lately but followed your advice and setup a PPTP connection to the EU server, speeds up to 1mb for P2p good enough for me
After signing up for and paying for a whole year’s use [big mistake], I soon found that I could get no connection using the protocol of my choice. Furthermore, my outgoing SMTP email from Thunderbird was blocked. To enable outgoing email meant turning off BTGuard. Except that there was no apparent way to turn it off – not anywhere except using Task Manager. Even then, outgoing email was still disabled until a reboot.
Having searched the FAQs and finding no answers, I put these problems to their support line. Two days later I received an email with nothing more than “For answers to personal technical support please visit: btguard/support”. This was their FAQ page and the place where you fill in the support request form. I replied that I had already done this and the relevant answers were not in the FAQs. Another two days later I received exactly the same reply. I told them that their replies were not technical support and that I was asking for a resolution to my problems otherwise I would be seeking a refund. No reply.
I then put my case for a refund to Paypal. Within a few hours I received an email from BTGuard telling me that my monthly subscription payment had not been received, and that my account had been locked out. Remember – I had already paid a year up front. Anyway, a week later I received notification from Paypal that my money had been returned. As much as people complain about Paypal, I have to say, their performance here was outstanding.
I think that it’s obvious here that I recommend people stay away from this service. Well away.
Michael, your experience *exactly* mirrors mine, except that I never even received any email at all from BTGuard. Thank goodness for Paypal having good customer service policies.
@MichaelEvans Thanks for the review.
General Note to users: To completely turn off any VPN client or the OpenVPN Gui locate the icon in the taskbar (bottom right of desktop), right click and select quit or exit. Often the icon will be hidden so click the Show hidden icons button (small up arrow) on the taskbar to locate it and quit from there.
With respect, do you think that I don’t know this and didn’t try it? I’m not a newbie at finding my way round a PC. I know about hidden icons. The tray icon did not respond to mouse clicks. Not right. Not left. Not double. Nothing.
BTGuard give exactly what they say. Anonymity for unlimited torrent downloads.The prices are quite simply very competitive. I’ve tried every trick in the book and I can’t find my own IP address or exact location anywhere.
I took a month’s subscription as a try out first. After a month BTGuard has never dropped the connection once, day or night. Speeds, from the Netherlands and using the EU servers, are near what my IP provider provides. I don’t need any support desk, so I can’t give any opinion. PPTP seems to give higher speeds than the OpenVPN GUI.
I would very strongly recommend to anyone considering BTGuard to do one month first as a trial, since no free trial is offered. My experience was that BTGuard does not work with my ISP (Time Warner Cable Roadrunner), but I did not discover this until after purchasing the service. The test torrents all worked fine but nothing else would, either with uTorrent or Vuze. I discovered in the Vuze wiki a link to info indicating that TWC causes an “unsolvable NAT problem”. (See chart at http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Internet_service_providers_that_do_not_like_file_sharing#United_States_of_America.) The IP address for my torrents did check out as advertised so protection does seem to be as stated. Speed seemed to be ok for the test torrent.
BTGuard support is non-existent as far as I can tell. Several attempts to contact Netcrawled/BTGuard were unsuccessful, even though I stated a desire to try upgrading to the full VPN service.
Works great with Vuse and uTorrent, Don’t get why people would bash BTGuard. It’s not perfect what is but it’s the solution we have, you want to stay anonymous this works
Does NOT work with Tixati. Support give rude and useless advice on configuring. Go somewhere else. The service is only as good as the support which SUCKS! Byeee….
So, it’s occasionally unreliable and download speeds can be slow at times. So what! Get with the plan people. BTGuard lets you download stuff anonymously, that’s what it does thats what you pay for and for that its frikin awesomnal!
PTPP is unreliable
VPN Connection drops sometimes
Speed is TERRIBLE – my ping is 500ms and speedtest results are 0.75mb/s down, 1mb/s up. My connection without the VPN is 28mb/s down, 10mb/s up.
Support never responds to emails
Price is competitive.
I regret spending the $10 for a month but there was no trial (should have been a red flag).