Our Reaction to SOPA/PIPA announcement
24
January

We here at ExpressVPN are pleased to know that two recent U.S. bills that threaten Internet users’ liberties and personal freedom have been stalled. Due to public outcry that saw Wikipedia and other high-traffic websites blacked out for 24 hours last week, the U.S. Congress appears to have put these measures on hold.

The reason why SOPA/PIPA concerned us and other Internet services like Twitter and Facebook is that they would have made all companies legally responsible for user-generated content. For example, if you write a blog that has a comment section, and one of your users posts a link to an illegally shared file, as the blog owner you could be held criminally liable.

The Internet has thrived because it has been a forum for sharing information freely. If websites are forced to actively police all user submissions, we fear this would ultimately lead to censorship. While we do understand the need of copyright owners to protect their intellectual content, we hope that lawmakers will look for a better solution.

Our users value the free and open Internet experience that ExpressVPN provides. At the same time, as a a VPN service provider, we do not want to be held liable when an individual misuses our services. Any future law that would attempt to do so would be a threat to our existence. We hope that U.S. lawmakers will bear that in mind and uphold these values to promote a free society.

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All-new version of ExpressVPN for Mac – Upgrade Now
03
December

We’re excited to announce a completely new version of ExpressVPN for Mac OS X 10.6 and higher.

Compared to our previous application for Mac, it offers:

  1. More than 10 additional server locations, including Hong Kong, Singapore, various countries in Europe, and more cities in the US
  2. Faster speeds
  3. Improved visual design

The upgrade is free for all existing customers. To get it now:

  1. Log into our customer portal
  2. Click “View VPN Account Details”
  3. In the section “Default ExpressVPN Account”, click on the link to download our Mac application
  4. Copy the “activation code” listed there, and paste it into the application after installation

Feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to guide you through the upgrade.

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Announcing several new server locations
03
December

Over the past few weeks we’ve added new locations around the world, such as:

  1. Singapore
  2. Italy
  3. Ireland
  4. Poland
  5. Lithuania
  6. Czech Republic
  7. Portugal
These are automatically available to anyone using the ExpressVPN applications for Windows and Mac, and they’re included in all subscriptions. Connect to any of these locations whenever you like.
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Announcing the new ExpressVPN for Windows – Upgrade Now
07
August

We’re proud to announce the release of ExpressVPN version 3.09 for Windows.

  1. Easier to use
  2. Faster connections
  3. More server choices


The upgrade is free for all existing customers. To get it now:

  1. Log into our customer portal
  2. Click “View VPN Account Details”
  3. In the section “Default ExpressVPN Account”, click on the link to download the application
  4. Copy the “activation code” listed there, and paste it into the application after installation

 

Feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to guide you through the upgrade.

We expect to have a new Mac version available within a few weeks as well, and we will announce it on this blog as soon as it’s ready.

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Announcing live VPN chat support
11
April

Over the past two months we’ve started offering live chat support on our website. We’d now like to officially announce that feature. You’ll see a chat-icon at the bottom-right corner of our website whenever anyone of us here at ExpressVPN is available to chat.

Since most of our customers are in Asia and the Middle East, we’re generally available from 9am to 11pm GMT+8 Hong Kong time. If you don’t see us online, you can always write to us and we’ll respond usually within a few hours.

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New ExpressVPN “superhero” site design
05
April

We just launched our newly designed website. We call it our “superhero” theme. Hopefully you’ll like this one even better than our previous orange-colored theme. Please take a look. We’d love to hear your comments.

Unblock Facebook with ExpressVPN

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ExpressVPN service is up and running normally after the Japan earthquake
22
March

The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan damaged up to half of all undersea cables used for carrying Internet traffic across the Pacific. This temporarily impacted network speeds from Asia to the US. As of this week, the telecom companies’ repair ships have already fixed some of the damage, and VPN network speeds here at ExpressVPN are quickly returning back to normal.

Looking for a fast and reliable VPN? Sign up now with our 30-day money back guarantee.

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TCP VPN servers — useful if you’re having trouble connecting with the default configuration
07
November

Here’s a technical post to explain how our support team solves connection problems that a small set of customers in the Middle East have experienced.

ExpressVPN offers both UDP and TCP-based VPN servers using the OpenVPN protocol. By default, your account is configured to connect via UDP. However, some ISPs or corporate firewalls block UDP traffic, preventing your computer from establishing a connection to our VPN network. Here’s an example of a log file where this problem occurs:

Sun Sep 26 20:12:30 2010 UDPv4 link remote: 98.126.5.194:1194

Sun Sep 26 20:12:30 2010 TLS: Initial packet from 98.126.5.194:1194, sid=f4b9e3d7 ff634c5c

Sun Sep 26 20:13:18 2010 TCP/UDP: Closing socket

Notice how there is a one minute delay between the last two lines.

When we see such cases, we ask the customer to try our TCP servers, and that usually solves the problem. We offer TCP servers in each of our network clusters around the world. Click here to see a list of ExpressVPN Server Locations, including instructions for adding our TCP configuration files.

If you ever run into connection issues, please email us and we’ll guide you through getting the problem fixed.

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How to unblock Facebook with a VPN
13
October

Let’s say you’re based in the Middle East or Asia and your access to Facebook is blocked. Most people know by now that using a VPN is the easiest and most secure way to unblock these sites and access them freely. So how does it work? How does a VPN let me access Facebook and other blocked sites?

There are two main ways in which some countries block certain websites:

  1. DNS poisoning. This term refers to the following censorship tactic: For example, you want to access facebook.com in your web browser. Your computer first needs to find out the IP address of one of Facebook’s servers so it can connect and show you its website. To find out the IP address, your computer will do a “DNS lookup” by talking to your ISP (Internet Service Provider). It asks effectively “what is the IP for facebook.com?”. In a country where Facebook is blocked, the DNS server will then send an intentionally falsified response back. Instead of telling you the correct IP for Facebook, it’ll tell you the wrong, or “poisoned” IP. That’ll usually send you nowhere and create an error message in your browser. How does a VPN help? The VPN switches you to DNS server in an outside country without censorship. As soon as you connect to our VPN, we switch your computer to use DNS servers that are located very close to our datacenters. In other words, by connecting to ExpressVPN you switch your computer to using “clean” DNS servers that don’t do any poisoning. When you want to access Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or any other blocked sites, we’ll tell you the true IP address.
  2. Blocking access to specific IPs. In addition to DNS poisoning, some countries and ISPs will also block network connections to the IP addresses of the sites they’d like to block. So even if you have access to a non-poisoned DNS server and find out the correct IP address, you may still not be able to connect to it without a VPN. The VPN lets you connect to anywhere you want by creating an encrypted network tunnel from your computer to our VPN servers. The censors can’t see what’s being sent through the tunnel and where it’s going. For example, your computer sends a request to a Facebook IP. The request will first go through the encrypted VPN tunnel, reach our servers, then proceed from there directly to Facebook via the uncensored Internet. Facebook’s response then flows in the reverse direction back to you.

Point #1 is one key difference between a VPN and a simple web proxy. The latter doesn’t update your DNS servers and therefore doesn’t guard against DNS poisoning.

Bottom line: A VPN protects you from both methods of censorship. If your access to Facebook is currently blocked, get a VPN and you’ll be able to access it again.

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Some data about the reliability of Express VPN servers
13
October

Hi, it’s Ben from the ExpressVPN engineering team. I’d like to share a bit of data about the reliability of our VPN servers. Our network is distributed across several different data-centers around the globe:

  1. Los Angeles
  2. Seattle
  3. San Francisco / San Jose
  4. Washington, DC
  5. London
  6. Paris
  7. Amsterdam
  8. Nuremberg, Germany
  9. and even Hong Kong (though we only use that data-center for customers who specifically need to be in Hong Kong. Speeds from Asia are typically best accessing servers in Los Angeles. Even though the physical distance is greater, the network pipes are wider across the Pacific, giving you faster speeds.)

We use automated systems to constantly monitor each of our servers, and we get woken out of bed if anything ever goes wrong. Each server is typically available 99.5% of the time, and many of them even 100% on a month-to-month basis. Since we have multiple servers even in the same data-center, that means customers very rarely, if ever, notice a server being down. On top of that, customers can choose which datacenter to connect to, so even in the rare event that one datacenter is unavailable, there will be several other backups to connect.

Bottom line: over the past year our total service availability has been far above 99.9%. Here’s the full data report from our monitoring partner pingdom.com if you’re interested.

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