Hotspot Shield’s Low Latency Is Good for Gamers Hotspot Shield Free’s local New York connection delivered identical speeds to the Premium version, and connecting to a long-distance server in the UK was the same - we recorded speeds of 55Mbps. Hotspot Shield Free and Premium only seriously differed in our tests when connecting to the US West Coast, where we picked up speeds of 72Mbps using the free version - 23% slower compared to the Premium alternative. Hotspot Shield Free is just as fast as the Premium version, but it’s limited to four server locations in three countries. This protocol is designed to fix latency issues with other protocols, like OpenVPN. Hotspot Shield achieves these speeds through its exclusive connection protocol, Hydra VPN.

This is very impressive.Ĭonnecting to a US West Coast server, we experienced a speed loss of just 10%, which is faster than rivals like Surfshark and NordVPN. In our tests, we measured little difference between our normal internet connection and a Hotspot Shield connection, regardless of which server we connected to.

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