RA4W VPN Review 2023 – Things to Consider Before Buying it

Ra4W is good for light usage, however, as we've already discussed in this RA4W VPN review, this VPN is based in the U.S, and it doesn't work with Netflix.

RA4W VPN Review

RA4W VPN is a US-based VPN service that offers a limited number of server locations, and average download and upload speeds. To analyze the functionality of RA4W, we’ve performed specific tests on speed, server networks, streaming, torrenting, and customer support for our RA4W VPN review.

RA4W comes in a single package with a wide range of features, which is convenient for users. In addition, the price is low but offers only a seven-day money-back guarantee. It has a no-logs policy and decent encryption (256-bit) but is relatively less advanced than other best VPNs.

We’ve also identified RA4W has many shortcomings like the fact is, it isn’t preferable for streaming. It doesn’t unblock US Netflix or other streaming services. Moreover, it has a small network of server coverage.

In the meanwhile, let’s have a look at our RA4W VPN review and why we rated the VPN as such.


Our Verdict

Overall Rating :

3.8 / 10

Ranked #42 out of 56 VPNs

RA4W happens to be one of those VPNs that seriously need to invest and improve its services. Not only it provides average speeds and few servers globally, it also needs to work on bypassing censorship and offering P2P-compatible servers. Unfortunately, we wouldn't recommend this VPN to anyone after our RA4W review.
RA4W VPN Category Ratings
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Why Should You Trust Us?

We have spent thousands of hours and days testing 160+ VPN services using our carefully curated testing process to recommend you the best VPN. Here are a few statistics:

  • tick_doneTotal Hours of Testing1000+
  • tick_doneWeekly Speed Tests110
  • tick_doneVPN Services Reviewed160+
  • tick_doneStreaming Platforms Tested Daily50+
  • tick_doneIP & DNS Leak Tests Performed100+
  • tick_doneHow Much we have spent on testing$30,000+


Key Findings – RA4W VPN Review

Here are our key findings after conducting our RA4W VPN review:

Pros
  • Affordable pricing
  • Suitable for torrenting
  • Support Bitcoin

Cons
  • No live chat support
  • Causes IP/DNS leak
  • Doesn’t unblock US Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime
  • Poor privacy features


Pricing – How much does Ra4W VPN cost?

Ra4W has an affordable pricing plan. Currently, it is offering 3 different plans. These are listed below:

RA4W Plans Pricing
1 Month US$4.99/mo
1 Year US$2.91/mo
2 Years US$2.08/mo

Have a detailed look at RA4W VPN pricing plans:

ra4w-pricing-plans

RA4W pricing plans in general are affordable.

If you compare RA4W pricing with the ExpressVPN cost, then you’d realize the former is relatively inexpensive than the latter. Its most popular plan is the 1-year plan that the provider itself boasts about. It also offers a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Payment Methods

The only two ways of payment methods offered by Ra4W are:

  • PayPal
  • Stripe (Credit/Debit Cards)
  • Bitcoin

ra4w-payment-methods

Overall, RA4W may offer tempting pricing plans, however, the services it provides aren’t even worth the price you’re paying for. So its entirely up to you whether to trust this blog not.


RA4W VPN – Servers and Locations

The service is currently offering 30 servers in 25 countries of the world. RA4W VPN’s 6 servers are located in the United States.

Moreover, the server networks spread worldwide, including servers in South Africa, South Korea, and China. Surprisingly, RA4W also has some servers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. We’re guessing these servers are located virtually instead of physically. Otherwise, there’s a huge risk of data leaks in such regions.

However, considering many VPNs (ExpressVPN and NordVPN) are offering more than 3000+ servers on their server list, RA4W is quite behind in the race. Evidently, the numbers here are on the lower side. The servers on offer are noticeably diverse. You even get one from China when you sign up with the VPN.

ra4wvpn-servers

We found it hard to connect to a bunch of servers which was quite a letdown. Such as Moscow and Hong Kong. With the few servers RA4W has, it’ll quickly be overrun by users who’ll face congestion in speeds. The VPN may have a hard time keeping up with the increasing demands. We also noticed that the VPN has certain timings when many of its servers are offline and only a few are online.

ra4w-servers

Most of the time RA4W servers are offline and only a few are online.


RA4W VPN – Privacy and Security

In this RA4W VPN security review, we found out that this VPN offers the highest 256-bit military-grade encryption with online anonymity protection. RA4W has robust security features to protect you from hackers, ISP/DNS leaks, and many noteworthy threats.

Jurisdiction – Is it located in a 5-eyes country?

Yes, Ra4W is based in the United States and is a part of the Five Eyes Alliance. This alliance creeps into its own citizens and then shares its data.

America is the land of the free and home of the brave. Ironically, it is also the home of the NSA, one of the top cyber-surveillance agencies in the world. Hence, a VPN based in this country is never completely safe. In this Ra4W VPN review, we learned that even with a strong privacy policy, RA4W’s jurisdiction is a bit problematic. Now you know the answer to where is RA4W VPN based.

Logging & Privacy Policy

RA4W has a crystal clear privacy policy. The providers make it evident that they do not keep usage logs. But it also shares the information it stores publically:

  • Email
  • Payment information
  • Web cookies

ra4w-privacy-policy

So, in short, they only keep your email address and do not retain any of your personal information. Without a doubt, the privacy policy is one of the greatest facets of RA4W VPN.

Moreover, maintaining security is remarkable while operating in the US. As data-retention laws can demand online companies to provide users ‘ personal information including login credentials in their database. Thus, making RA4W highly vulnerable in terms of data logs.

Protocols and Encryption

RA4W VPN offers an OpenVPN protocol. As the industry-standard protocol, OpenVPN has so far proven to be the best online security mechanism. The said encryption uses SHA1 authentication and the 2048-bit RSA key. Blowfish 128 CBC cipher encryption.

Leaks – Does it leak IP, DNS & WebRTC?

No, it doesn’t. While performing the Ra4W VPN review, we found that it easily passed all kinds of leak tests. We connected to the Paris server to check leaks in a VPN. Here are the test results:

IP Test

We tested RA4W VPN for IP leaks by connecting to its server in France. As you can see in the screenshot, the test results depicted a France IP address instead of our actual IP address:

Ra4W-VPN-IP-Test

We didn’t face any IP leaks while using RA4W VPN.

DNS Test

We also tested RA4W for any DNS leaks and thankfully found none. The DNS test results showed we had a France IP address and hid our actual IP address:

Ra4W-VPN-DNS-Test

No DNS leaks took place while using RA4W VPN.

WebRTC Test

Furthermore, we also tested RA4W VPN for any WebRTC leaks just to be sure. As you can see from the results below, we have an IP address belonging to France instead of our actual location:

Ra4W-VPN-WebRTC-Test

RA4W didn’t cause any WebRTC leaks thankfully.


RA4W VPN – Speed and Performance

The speed of RA4W VPN is average for streaming, and it isn’t that good. While testing RA4W, we checked the download speeds, upload speeds, and ping across numerous servers. To conduct the speed test, we connected to its Paris, France server.

Our internet speed before connecting to Ra4W VPN: 33 Mbps

Our internet speed after connecting to the Paris server: 16.76 Mbps

As you can see, there’s a considerable difference in the speeds before and after connecting to RA4W. These speeds aren’t good enough for streaming in HD. The other servers also showed severe fluctuations in both the download and upload speeds. Because of the high ping, the VPN isn’t suitable for gaming at all. There was no server that gave us ping below 100ms.

You can check this screenshot of the RA4W speed test to get a clear view.

Ra4W-VPN-Speed-Test

RA4W speeds were quite average.

Although the VPN doesn’t impose any bandwidth caps or speed limits, it is user-friendly for allowing users to connect to preferred servers to their heart’s desire. On the other hand, if you’re using this VPN, you’ll face a lot of buffering and the loading time is also longer than necessary. Perhaps, if you’re content with the SD quality of streaming, you won’t have any qualms with this VPN.


RA4W VPN – Streaming

RA4W doesn’t work with Netflix. The VPN may be safe and affordable however it is not reliable at all for streaming. Nowhere does this VPN claims to unblock Netflix. So, we did not have our hopes up whilst testing it on the streaming site. It did not unblock Netflix either way.

netflix-proxy-error

We weren’t able to unblock Netflix using RA4W VPN.

The results were as expected. Netflix detected the VPN and blocked us almost instantly. Hence, it proves that RA4W doesn’t unblock geo-restricted streaming platforms and leads your IP address to be blocked by the specific region.

We guess anyone who wants to enjoy unrestricted streaming will have to get a that does a better job. Similarly, you can anticipate issues while accessing geo-restricted streaming services like Hulu and BBC iPlayer. We’d rather opt for the best VPN for streaming than invest in a VPN with average speeds overall.


Is it recommended for Torrenting?

No, it is not because even though RA4W claims to be a torrent-friendly VPN it comes with certain limitations.

To check the torrenting ability of RA4W, we tested it on BitTorrent-based apps on the US server and it didn’t work. Apparently, it allows torrenting on selected servers only. Once we connected to the right server, we were able to torrent files. Although the slow speeds didn’t help in downloading faster. Rather we had to wait nearly half an hour to download a 1.5 GB file.

However, Russia and Romania servers work well with torrenting. This means no DMCA notice or bandwidth limit gets in your way while torrenting with RA4W. But torrenting through a Russian server is a risky business so you may want to keep that in mind. The country’s known for its non-privacy-friendly stance and you may face data leaks that can reveal your actual location.

RA4W doesn’t offer a kill switch either which puts you at risk all the more.


Compatibility – Apps and Supported Devices

RA4W VPN is compatible with a wide range of devices such as Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS. Moreover, it also supports macOS and Linux. But RA4W fails to provide native apps for either of these platforms.

RA4W isn’t compatible with FireStick or gaming consoles which don’t surprise us. You may be able to install the VPN manually on these devices however that’s purely a guess. Because we didn’t find any leads for a guide or instruction manual for such a setup. On the other hand, RA4W does offer instruction manuals for downloading the VPN on routers like Tomato, AsusWRT, and DD-WRT routers.

Luckily, Windows users can download RA4W VPN directly on the system. In addition, they don’t offer browser extensions for Firefox and Google Chrome. They need to set up this VPN through manual configuration. Ideally, the service should have offered apps for these platforms, but sadly, this is not the case.


RA4W – Bypass Censorship

RA4W can’t bypass censorship sites in China.

It does offer a server in Hong Kong, China. However, you still can’t bypass the Great Firewall to unblock websites in the country. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to mask your IP address to bypass the geo-restriction in China partially because RA4W lacks the obfuscation servers needed for the purpose.

Also because the Chinese authorities have officially banned VPNs in the region. So every VPN site is blacklisted and therefore blocked.


RA4W Customer Support

Ra4W has decent customer support. Although there is no 24/7 Live Chat feature, there are plenty of other ways to contact support. These are:

The dedicated FAQs page for the users looks more appropriate than the other features of customer support.  You can also create a ticket to obtain the answer to your questions.

ra4w-customer-support-ticket

Since RA4W doesn’t offer live chat, you’ll have to make do with tickets.


Alternatives to RA4W

You can explore other options apart from RA4W. Check out these VPNs:


FAQs – RA4W Review

No, RA4W VPN is not good. Despite offering military-grade 256-bit encryption and claiming that it doesn’t log any user data, the cons of this VPN outmatch the pros. This VPN has multiple loopholes, including security and privacy issues. In addition, it cannot unlock the content in China. Moreover, we were disappointed as they didn’t refund our amount per the seven-day refund policy.

No, you can’t unblock Netflix with RA4W. We’ve tried to access Netflix with RA4W VPN servers. But, we failed to bypass the geo-restriction of these streaming sites. Well, you can easily unblock music streaming sites like Spotify or YouTube but big no for Netflix.

Yes, RA4W is safe. It has robust security features including 256-bit AES encryption, zero-logging policy, and OpenVPN protocol. These features prevent cyber attackers and hackers to access your personal information. But it’s a US-based VPN service. It is the part of 5 eyes alliance member country, which accesses your information without a permit.


Do we Recommend RA4W VPN?

No, we do not recommend Ra4W VPN.

Ra4W VPN is based in the United States, a country that is the NSA’s home and falls under the 5 eyes country. Your online privacy is in danger if you happen to use this VPN service.

Its server count is low as well. It has only 30 servers available in 25 countries. Although its server speed is good enough, a huge server load will be a big problem in the future. The good thing about this VPN was its ‘No-Log’ privacy policy, and that was the only thing that got our attention. But still, it didn’t manage to change our minds.

Consider exploring other VPN providers that we’ve assessed based on their security protocols, speed, and overall performance in our unbiased VPN reviews.

Overall, we would not advise our readers to buy this VPN after Ra4W VPN Review.