Some time ago, BolehVPN celebrated its fifth anniversary, today the company is growing stronger than ever and continually keeps introducing more new features and VPN servers. They got into the VPN industry because they felt that other VPN providers weren’t providing consistent quality, and thought that the people they befriended through online communities deserved better than that. Thus, BolehVPN was born and has since grown into a full-blown VPN service provider backed, still powered by a team of motivated and caring team members.
We invited BolehVPN’s Reuben Yap for an interview about his business, and found out more about its different services and beliefs.
How many servers, IPs and locations does BolehVPN count?
We have 25 servers in 9 different countries. However, not all of them are equal and some are more powerful than others. Also we may use different datacenters in each country and have about 600 IPv4 available. Below is a list of our servers:
- Canada: 3
- Netherlands: 4
- Switzerland: 5
- United Kingdom: 2
- United States of America: 4
- Luxembourg: 4
- Germany: 1
- Sweden: 1
- Hong Kong: 1
- Total: 25 servers
There is some debate as to whether the number of IPs are truly important since IP crowding (where several users will use the same IP) is seen by some as an added benefit since without logs it further makes it harder to attribute usage to a single user. We feel that we have a good balance of number of IPs for our user base giving users the benefits of dedicated IPs for those who need it (open ports for instance etc) and the increased privacy of shared IP usage.
Which information about your users and their sessions do you log?
We do not take user logs, timestamps, user activity or IP logs nor do we record info on how much bandwidth you consume. We may turn logs on from time to time to investigate suspicious activity (excessive number of connections, large amount of spam reports, excessive bandwidth consumption if we notice a server showing unusually high activity) but will wipe it off.
What differentiates you from other big VPN companies such as Private Internet Access?
We just recently offered a cloaking function that disguises VPN traffic that as of writing works in bypassing blocks in China, which is directly integrated into our Windows and Mac clients.
Our servers are also segregated into two types: Proxied and Fully-Routed. Proxied (means a SOCKS5 proxy residing within a VPN) that allows users to selectively choose which traffic to VPN and also provides some form of leak protection and further obfuscation. The Proxied is useful for those just wishing to protect their p2p while wanting to game/surf with minimal hassle.
Unlike most other VPN providers that rely on a central authentication system with a username and password to access the VPN, our VPN system is entirely certificate based with fixed expiries (based on the length of subscription). This means that there does not need to be any communication between a VPN server and our central customer database (which holds payment and contact details), which further improves security in the unlikely event a VPN server is seized and means our VPN servers exist and operate independently from our customer database.
I’m also particularly proud of my support team that offers a personal touch and we regularly do remote support sessions to help users out who have problems with their VPN’s. We have a friendly community in our forums and many friendships were formed through there.
We’re based out of Malaysia and are therefore subject to Malaysian law and can be considered in a way an ‘offshore’ location that would make legal enforcement more challenging. Malaysia does not have any data retention laws.
We also offer various free gifts and bonuses to our subscribers.
Are your company’s other services (game hosting, VoIP,…) using the same infrastructure as your VPN service?
No, they are separate residing on dedicated servers for those things and are meant to be catered for users in SE Asia. This is more of a service for users in Malaysia since there aren’t many providers out there for these services due to the low profit margins as cost of local Malaysian bandwidth is high.
How do you guarantee the speed of your VPN servers at all times?
On top of standard monitoring, we perform speed tests daily to verify the max speed of the server and analyze it against the traffic it is actually achieving with user load. We then adjust the user limits for that server and also regularly ascertain if we need to obtain additional servers. For countries which we feel are used heavily for P2P, we ensure those servers have high bandwidth/gigabit connections.
What are the biggest security and privacy issues that we’re facing in 2013?
The blocking and filtering of VPN and TOR that are becoming more prevalent in countries like Iran and China are worrying, especially its implications to businesses that rely on VPN’s. Mandatory user identification verification to use the net is also particularly worrying and would be a concern if more countries implement it which may be easy in countries that already have national identify registrations.
I also don’t think we’ve heard the last of the likes of SOPA, PIPA and other related legislation which may require the implementation of advanced deep packet inspection technology which would start a data obfuscation arms race which is already happening in China. Would be interesting to see how ACTA will be enforced as well in Europe.
Video: what BolehVPN can do for you
Which tips can you give to our readers to protect their identity?
Use Incognito modes in Chrome to prevent tracking in conjunction with a VPN/TOR and configure your firewall to only allow traffic through the VPN to prevent leaks in the event of disconnection.
Avoid signing in to 3rd party sites using Facebook/Twitter accounts.
How do you think the usage and usability of VPN’s in China will evolve?
The data obfuscation arms race has already started and VPN/TOR has been heavily cracked down. China has now passed law requiring mandatory real name registration and has also recently throttled and blocked VPN’s and employed machine learning algorithms to block VPN traffic. I think this problem will likely get worse before getting any better since real life protests over internet censorship are virtually non existent and China seems to be getting its way even with giants like Google.
In the long term, disguising traffic to appear like other types of traffic is only a temporary solution and unless there is some political uproar, the usage and usability of VPN’s will continue to be patchy as both sides develop new ways to circumvent each other.
What can we expect from BolehVPN in the months to come?
We have a few updates to our BolehVPN client already underway and we are hoping to publish our Android client sometime in the coming months. Also hope to integrate BitCoin acceptance pretty soon.
Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
We’ve grown from a small little outfit into a pretty decent business and much of our initial userbase was created based on the trust and goodwill we created. We started out in a forum called Lowyat and there were a couple of other VPN providers available there already, but the largest ones turned out to be scams who – when their VPN servers kept on crashing – just decided to up it and leave without any refunds. We absorbed these users and offered them free accounts for their unexpired periods with these providers and we retained a huge percentage of them once their free accounts expired.
Things have changed a lot since then, and now we have a couple of thousand users but we still remain true to the spirit when we first founded this. Integrity, personalized support and in many cases direct communication with the founders of the service. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers and especially our pioneering ones who have been with us for almost 6 years for making BolehVPN what it is today and in many cases becoming good friends.
Thank you to Reuben and the rest of the BolehVPN for doing this interview with us. If you are one of BolehVPN’s customers, then make sure to share your experiences using this VPN provider in a review on our site. Stay tuned for more VPN articles, news and interviews over the coming weeks!
Daniel C.
Sander D.
