You want your system to be safe, but you also want the performance to be reliable. When connected to a VPN, your speeds shouldn’t suffer from lag spikes and significant speed drops. The provider should have a strict no-logs policy, allow anonymous registration and payments. If your VPN doesn’t have any safety measures, it defeats the purpose of using the service. This includes military-grade encryption, best protocols (OpenVPN, IKEv2 or Wireguard), kill switch, and no IPv6/DNS leaks.
While these criteria can be debated, here’s what we chose to rate when picking the best services: There are many factors that make or break a VPN.