There’s also some confusion over how many servers and countries there are: the website claims there are 1,000+ servers in 218 countries, but my manual counts within Hola VPN were 399 and 42, respectively. Reportedly, you need to pay for Hola Ultra to connect to specific locations, which is a feature I’ve never seen paywalled in other premium VPNs. Outside of visible server load, manually selecting servers is pointless, given Hola Premium doesn’t display regions. It was so bad in my tests that streaming music sometimes wouldn’t start playing again. Comparatively, that’s a long time to wait, and it’s an absolute killer for real-time services, including music streaming. Whether you’re connecting automatically or manually selecting servers, it takes around 15 seconds to connect. By default, Hola VPN starts with Windows and, frustratingly, there’s no way to stop that in the settings, plus it requires both the software and Hola Background Services to run in your system tray. But you can just use the Windows software instead for greater control that’s not reliant on a Hola browser portal. Speaking of torrents, Hola VPN didn’t work at all with peer-to-peer software in my tests.Ĭlicking on one of these popular sites opens it and gives you a prompt to access it with a particular compatible VPN server, which is a nice touch.

It’s not surprising to see Netflix there, but there are also other regions like Hulu and BBC, not to mention more nefarious sites like The Pirate Bay. Signing into the Hola portal in a browser presents a diverse list of popular sites, supposedly the top ones in Australia. The former option is incredibly icky, so I opted for the latter. When I went to log in, I was greeted with a pop-up telling me I could exchange free system resources for the ‘free’ version or sign in for premium.

For my testing on a Windows 11 PC, Hola VPN was easy to sign up for (a good choice of either AU or US pricing) and easy to install.

How does hola vpn work