Frequently asked questions

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is technology using hardware, software, or both to secure and privatize data across a network, usually the Internet, by building what techies call an “encrypted tunnel.”

Data passes through this “tunnel,” protected from anyone who tries to intercept it. Even if the data is intercepted, it is hopelessly scrambled and useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it.

Large businesses commonly use VPNs between offices to secure company data, and often provide individual “remote access” VPN solutions to home-based or traveling employees to protect data between them and the company’s network.

You also use a VPN when you bank or shop online and see the https:// in your web browser. Unfortunately, the protection with an https:// session is temporary and limited to that specific website.

With FinchVPN’s VPN service, you initiate the secure encrypted tunnel from your side, so it is not dependent on the websites you visit. Your security and privacy is now maintained whether you see an https:// or not. Still, even with the protection of the VPN service, you should use https:// where available for end-to-end security to a specific website.

It’s also important to note that the protection and privacy we offer is not limited to just browsing. Our VPN service encrypts and anonymizes all your Internet data to and from our VPN gateways. This includes Skype, IM, streaming, e-mail, as well as browsing.

From Wikipedia

A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network and the resources contained in the network across public networks like the Internet. It enables a host computer to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it were a private network with all the functionality, security and management policies of the private network.[1] This is done by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, encryption, or a combination of the two. The VPN connection across the Internet is technically a wide area network (WAN) link between the sites but appears to the user as a private network link—hence the name "virtual private network".

FinchVPN is based off OpenVPN, an open source SSL VPN. We implement a custom GUI for Windows and Android users to facilitate easy installation.

It is widely accepted as one of the most secure VPN implementations out there and is extremely flexible, stable and fast. It also supports a wide variety of platforms (Windows/Unix/Linux/Mac/Android).

We also offer PPTP VPN (best effort) as part of our package for those of you using devices that do not have native OpenVPN support.

Free account have a 3GB monthly bandwidth usage limit and you can only access to our free public VPN servers. Premium users will have ability to connect to all FinchVPN public VPN servers.

A VPN will automatically anonymously encrypt your entire internet connection and as such all applications on your computer will be secured, whereas with a web proxy you'll need to configure certain applications manually (such as your web browser). VPN's use much stronger encryption methods and are therefore considered more secure than web proxies.

Your ISP will only see a secured encrypted connection to one of our remote VPN servers. They won't be able to decipher your online activities and make sense of your internet traffic.

A software firewall only protects your data on your computer, and anti-virus software only protects you from, well, viruses. Neither protects your data as it flows over your local network, at a Wi-Fi Hotspot, or through your ISP. Without a VPN, your data is completely exposed and can easily be monitored and captured.

As laptops, smartphones, and wireless networks have grown more popular, a great deal more data has become a great deal more mobile. Your ISP, search engines, and every website you visit captures and stores information about you. It is more crucial than ever to protect your data, as well as your identity and privacy, with a VPN.

Yes. The VPN services should work over any Internet connection. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and other wireless technologies should all support the VPN tunnel. We do recommend a broadband connection for best performance.

No. Absolutely not.

No, there are no limit on how many times a user can switch between FinchVPN servers.

We are using API Key as your password for maximum security, you can find your account API key at https://www.finchvpn.com/account#api_key , If you wish to login with your own password, you can enable password login at https://www.finchvpn.com/account/edit (Only for OpenVPN, PPTP will need to use API key to login)

To purchase our service, please place an order here.
If you do not know how to utilize FinchVPN, please visit the installation guides and choose your respective operating system.

We do not monitor on what you use our servers for but users are reminded that it is their responsibility to adhere to the laws of their country and that illegal activites are frowned upon. To protect the integrity of our servers however and to ensure good performance for our customers, if it is found that a user is using our service to perform DoS or similiar type attacks or spamming, we will investigate this and terminate the user summarily.
We also reserve the right to add to this list of prohibited activites or terminate a user if for any reason his/her use poses a threat or harms the service.
For additional information please look at our Terms of Service

Short Answer: NO, since VPN needs an internet connection to work, If you do not have a load or an internet plan then this means that your phone cannot connect to the internet.

Long Answer: FinchVPN can sometimes connect on some ISPs even without load or your ISP won't deduct anything on your load. That is possible because if your ISP has a loophole on their network or they are having a maintenance which enables your device to use the internet even if they do not have any airtime,load,balance or active internet plan on their mobile phone. Some ISPs only monitors certain traffic and destination ports of your connection to know if you are using your internet connection or not.

For example is if your ISP inadvertently opened a port that is not monitored for accounting purposes. The most common open port is UDP port 53, this port is used by DNS servers. DNS is used in resolving hostnames to their numerical IP addresses. Like in ICMP most ISPs also freely allows you to send UDP packets on that port without charging you since this port is normally only used to resolve domain names. Now when your ISP starts monitoring that port then you wont be able to tunnel on that port for free.

Additional question: Is there anything I can do to prevent my ISP from deducting my load?

Answer: You can find a new open port that your ISP is not monitoring. If you cannot find a new port then there is nothing you can do if they started deducting your load since they(Your ISP) are the one responsible if they will charge you or not. If they closed the port you are using then there is no way you can bypass that since that is already set in their firewall which you and even us have no access to.

No, generally you won't notice any difference.

There are a number of factors that will determine the speed you get behind a VPN server. The most obvious factor is your internet speed to begin with, and the distance between your physical location and the location of our VPN server nodes. For example connecting from Thailand to our New York VPN server is 8660 miles away, and so some speed loss is going to be inevitable. The closer you are to our VPN server locations, there is less chance you'll experience speed loss.

Sometimes users do report the VPN bypasses their ISP's throttles. Some users do report applications run better as well such as P2P.

• Make sure you are connected to the closest location possible for your desired country
• Make sure you have tried all available networks for your closet city
• Speed Test Not Always Accurate
• Update your DNS

Any VPN or security application can slow performance, but it depends on a great many factors which can vary second to second and with each website you visit. Some users actually experience a speed increase when using the VPN service.

Overall, due to the encryption and distance, you will likely see a slowdown in download speed, but it shouldn’t be too noticeable in any practical terms. And, due to how the VPN “optimizes” traffic you can usually rely on an increase in upload speed, which can improve the performance of applications such as VoIP.

- No, we do not limit user by bandwidth or time. However usage limits are subject to the package in use, for more information you can visit https://www.finchvpn.com/pricing

- Note that certain servers came with limited amount of usage quota due to expensive uplink bandwidth/power/space, but you can always reset your Premium usage on FinchVPN account panel.

No. All payments are handled by external payment providers, and we do not log any personal information about you when you proceed with a payment. There is no way to connect your payment information to your VPN usage. You will always be anonymous with FinchVPN, even if you use a credit card!

Absolutely! For those that pay for 1 year in advance, we offer discounts of up to 25%.

So far we have only found out that this will only work certain ISPs. We are not able to guarantee that it will definitely work, as these carriers may actively close the ports that is used to exploit this. Also, such acts may breach either carriers' Terms of Agreement.

Please note that the phrase bypassing quota means that one will be able to surf at normal (if not higher) speeds even after throttling has occurred; a result of a used up internet quota. It may not necessary mean that you can avoid getting pro-rated!

No. One individual per account. We already offer great bandwidth deals, and sharing your accounts with many different users violates our policy and will decrease the quality of our service. For the enjoyment of everyone, please play fair... and don't share!

We do not limit our premium users in any way. They can use as much bandwidth as they want. There is no fair use policy: you always get what you paid for!

Your monthly usable traffic volume will be reset every first day of the month.

Due to high amount of infected Windows computers and SPAM we had to block outgoing SMTP (TCP port 25) connections on our VPN servers for all dynamic IP VPN customers.

Once your computer is infected by virus, it sends SPAM emails and it may cause termination of your VPN service as it is violation of terms of service. That's why you should keep your computer clean of viruses.

We block all outgoing SMTP (TCP port 25, 465, 587) connections. Alternatively you may use a web based email client which usually provided by your email provider such as Hotmail and Gmail.

No, torrent-ing is not allowed on certain location/server because these server/network provider are comply to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act implemented by the United States on 1998. For more details about the DMCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

No, we do not enforce bandwidth in any form. User are allowed to get the speed they should be getting, most of our server come with 1Gbit port speed.

Yes, but this feature is currently offered as-in best afford beta. Setting is available via https://www.finchvpn.com/account/ports

- Yes, realtime status can be viewed in a single page here

- For more details on our servers bandwidth utilization, one can view it at here

We offer a wide range of tunnel port including but not limited to 21, 53, 80, 443, 1194, 8484.

To do this, you will need to make use of the Bind IP function which is both available on the Windows and the Mac.

First of all, you will need to enable the Advanced settings. To do this, navigate to Tools > Options > Mode and check Advanced.

After you have enabled it, go to Connection > Advanced Connection Settings

Next, you will just need to enter the interface name of the TAP adaptor under Bind to local IP address or interface. Just enter the value of the TAP adaptor which can be referenced from the list of available interfaces listed in the same window. For Windows, it's usually begins with eth. As for the Mac, tun.

Lastly, you will need to check the Enforce Ip Bindings option at the bottom of the page.

Our VPN use Perfect Forward Secrecy with Diffie-Hellman exchange.

We use the standard AES 160 bits that came default with the VPN software we're utilizing.

Our system designed to not tied any specific user details/activities on any specific FinchVPN servers.

Yes, we enforce HTTPS on our websites and we also make sure that our SSL meet the industrial requirement. Qualys SSL Labs reports shows that our website SSL are graded A.

We only use FinchVPN username and API Key (randomly generated) as authentication, however user have the ability to enable password login if they are feeling uncomfortable with the secure API key.

We are using the standard TLSv1/SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES2 as control channel.

FinchVPN does not maintain any logs beyond the usual system logs required to run our servers. We do not monitor any traffic of our customers nor will we willingly share customer details. We may from time to time turn on the logs temporarily if we are attempting to troubleshoot a performance issue or locate a user abusing our service (see prohibited activities above).

In the event there is a request for account data, FinchVPN's policy is to notify members of requests for their data unless it is prohibited from doing so by statute or court order. In any case, as FinchVPN does not store any user identifiable data in relation to customer's usage of the VPN, there is in any case little data that can be given over beyond the date that you paid and your payment details.

It is noted that we do not require you to specify a real name during account signup and only require a working e-mail address. For your protection, we may contact you to ask for further details should there be any disputes arising from your payment.

FinchVPN also sends newsletter with updates on our services via e-mail which you can easily opt out of.

To detect whether a VPN connection is still active and connected OpenVPN will send regular "pings" between the server and the client to check that the VPN connection is still active. If no pings are received by the client over a period of time, then it knows that the VPN connection is no longer connected and it should try to reconnect.

If your VPN connection is dropping out, and the "Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart)" error is listed in the OpenVPN log, it means FinchVPN/OpenVPN isn't receiving any pings from the OpenVPN server. This could be caused by any of the following issues:

• If you receive an Inactivity timeout error before even successfully connecting it means that OpenVPN was unable to connect to the remote VPN server. This could indicate the address or port of the VPN server is incorrect, the server is offline, or a firewall is blocking your connection.

• If you receive an Inactivity timeout error shortly are connecting every time, it indicates a configuration problem (usually a route clashing with the route to the remote VPN server) and you should get in touch with us.

• Some countries that engage in Internet censorship may attempt to disrupt VPN connections. If you are connecting from such a location and are seeing regular drop outs please contact us.

• The VPN server may be configured to only expect one connection from your account or certificate at a time. If you have more that one device connected at a time it could result once or both connections being unable to pass traffic and receive an Inactivity timeout.

• Some stateful firewalls or NAT routers may inadvertently block a connection after a period of time. If your computer has any firewall or Internet security software install, or you have a firewall activated on your router, try temporarily disabling it and see if the Inactivity timeouts still occur.

This Windows OpenVPN error occurs when the TAP-Win32 Adapter v9 for OpenVPN connection is not available or needs to be installed.

In an attempt to resolve this issue, please try the following:

• Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP:

  1. Navigate to Start menu>All programs>Find folder for TAP-WINDOWS
  2. Under Utilities, right click "Delete All TAP Adapters" and select Run as Administrator
  3. Then, under utilities, right click "Install New TAP Adapter" and select Run as Administrator
  4. Retry your OpenVPN connection

• Windows 8:

  1. Please access the Start screen and type in "tap" into the search bar on the top-right. You should see two apps pop up on the left.
  2. Click the "Delete ALL TAP virtual ethernet adapters" and 'Run as Administrator'. A prompt will pop up and you'll need to press any key twice to continue.
  3. Next, go back to the Apps screen and enter "tap" again into the search bar, this time click the other app that came up, "A new TAP virtual ethernet adapter" and 'Run as Administrator'. Another prompt will pop up and you'll need to press any key to continue.
  4. Retry your OpenVPN connection

This is a general PPTP error that is most often caused by router or security software interference.

Solution:

1. Ensure that PPTP pass-through is enabled on your router.
2. Temporarily disable your firewall and/or other security software.

This PPTP error occurs if port 1723 is blocked or closed, or if a response wasn't received from the VPN server.

Solution:

1. Ensure that PPTP pass-through is enabled on your router.
2. Temporarily disable your firewall and/or other security software.