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.
BTGuard is a pretty cheap proxy for your Bit Torrent program. It is usable with the latest uTorrent program and various others. I’m not sure about the support, but I have seen bad reviews about the support. The price is excellent and I have been getting really good speeds out of it, sometimes they max out my bandwidth.
However, I have noticed that some trackers both HTTP and UDP don’t work. One minute a tracker won’t work and a minute later it will. I’m not sure about what’s up with that, but I’m not one to complain about it since lots of trackers are usually provided.
I don’t see what the issue is The proxy service runs great I followed the step by step directions and everything ran swimmingly. I havent had any issues what so ever. speeds is great sad to say a lot this may be your isp or setting in your FW I ran into one snag and that was my fw was blocking the port BT gaurd used for torrent traffic I opened it up and it worked like a champ.
vpnadmin note: User did not complete star ratings
Honestly terrible. Speed varies massively and is never constant. The best you can do is disconnect and reconnect lots of times in the host that the new server will be faster than the last.
Customer support is non-existent. When I requested to reset my password I received my password back in plain-text. Meaning either, my password is stored in plain-text, or it is encrypted and decrypted. Both leaving them open to a massive database attack. After questioning this I received no response at all.
I have scored protection as the lowest due to the fact that if support is terrible and the speed is not what is advertised, how can you also trust their claims to not keep any logs?!. The only saving grace may be that they are too stupid to do it correctly even if they wanted to.
Avoid.
Not bad, except for the fact that they’re slow. Not renewing with them.
vpnadmin note: User did not complete star ratings
THEY SUCK DONT CHOOSE THEM!!!!!
USA customers beware! Dial-up is faster than BTGuard. Totally unusable. MY FIOS connection is 35.65 Mbps vs BTGuard 0.45 Mbps.
same as the majority. awful speed and non-existent support. luckily i just paid for 1 month to try it. and yes, i got it because of a review by torrentfreak.
Just purchased their 1-month VPN service. I can’t do anything. Simple as that. The speeds are slower than trying to use the Tor network. It takes 20+ seconds for small webpages to load. Max speed I’ve gotten torrenting is about 25 kb/s when I usually get 2mb/s. I only tried them because of their reviews in torrentfreak and lifehacker. I should have done my homework better, I suppose. Not even going to try and get a refund, as everyone says their support is crap as well. And if that isn’t enough to deter you from the service, then the features offered through the service are non-existent as well. Very basic service. Overall = Very disappointed.
Not great. No UDP support. The support guy does not answer, and can get rude when/if he does. I’m on this site today because I’m looking for a better proxy.
Yeah, I ran into the same issues w btguard.
Recently switched to TorGuard, they do support UDP, but I had to use deluge to get it working, utorrent keeps timing out on udp trackers. the support team there is actually nice and doesn’t make me feel like an idiot.
Great. I believe the people having issues with the speed is linked to their internet providers throttling their service bcuz of ur being used for downloads. My carrier does not throttle there is no way to track what I do and it honestly with great surprise worked wonderfully. There was some hesitation on whether or not it was working but I did the test and it said that it was installed correctly. The speeds seemed to h as consistant as they were without the service. I read plenty of reviews before purchacing this. So far I have no regrets. Simple install using the version of utorrent that is offered on their site and downloaded btguard and it set up its self very surprised.