The company is located in Romania where user privacy is like it was in the old days in most western countries. Liviu from Netsec Interactive Solutions, the company behind VPN.ac, was so kind to free up some time from developing new VPN technology to have an interview with us.
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and VPN.ac?
Hello and thank you for inviting me to this Q&A. I am 30 years old and I am working in IT security since I was 19 – providing consultancy and security testing services for customers such as banks, private companies and public institutions. Netsec Interactive Solutions is the company I am working for since 2009 – a company that is 100% information security oriented.
VPN.AC is a service of our security company and we are a team of 3 techies currently involved into this project – not a big team some would say, but we definitely know what we’re doing.
Why did you decide to start a VPN service?
Since 2009, our company is a local supplier of encrypted storage devices. We started the VPN service as a complementary solution to our encrypted storage drives – hence being able to provide security for local storage and data transfer over the internet, along with privacy. Being a team of security professionals, we were able to implement a VPN service that was heavily customized to provide a high level of security, not relying on default – yet insecure – deployments. What we used (and how we used) as long-term VPN users of our private/personal VPN servers was implemented into a public VPN service. While VPN protocols provide a strong security level even in default state, there are other important security aspects that matter a lot, and many are not aware of those: website security, billing panels, server-side security and so on. We cover all of them in our implementation – in order to make sure that the customer’s data is safe with us.
In a nutshell – we decided to offer the public the same technologies we’ve been using ourselves for several years and apply our know-how on securing the entire service.
Currently all of your servers are located in Northern America and Europe. Are you planning on expanding your servers, IP’s elsewhere in the world as well?
Yes. We will add more servers in locations of our customers’ choice.
What’s the advantage of being located in Romania? How are the internet, privacy regulations like in your country?
Romania is an emerging country and European Union member since 2007. That’s only 6 years now, so it will take a considerable amount of time until we have to fully implement EU requirements – and I am referring especially to EU laws that would affect user privacy. Wiretapping, internet usage monitoring and any privacy invading actions are not currently a priority for our government. There are many other things that have to be addressed first – such as solving high-level corruption problems, the fight against money laundering, fraud and tax evasion.
Before 1989, Romania was under a Communist Regime: very strict government surveillance of citizens was an important part of that unfortunate regime. People are very sensitive now and don’t want history to repeat itself – not even at a smaller scale, hence I am expecting privacy regulations here to remain on a non-priority list in the near future.
How do you manage to offer your Basic VPN plan for such a low price, even though you’re currently a somewhat smaller provider?
We have to match the competition’s offers, regardless of how big and well established other VPN providers are. Overall, we provide a privacy service at a price that matches the competitors in terms of features such as speed and reliability – but we are providing some more advantages.
One, and probably the most important advantage is the fact that we are a security company operated by some guys with deep-roots in the security field. That’s a guarantee that our customers data – be it site registration info or VPN traffic – is safe with us. We don’t just sell a privacy service, we are also using it ourselves. We know how it works, we know how many nights we stayed awake to fix bugs, we know how secure it is and we are improving it as we speak since there is always room for improvements.
Why should our users sign up with VPN.ac and not a competing service?
There are some important advantages in choosing us, a smaller provider:
- A smaller user-base, which means that we don’t oversell bandwidth, hence more available bandwidth for our customers.
- A better support experience since we do not externalize support to operators that assist customers by copy & pasting predefined answers. With us, customers talk directly to those who developed and maintain the entire VPN service.
- We are technical people, not marketing teams, so we value our customers as real persons not “advertising conversions”.
- Being a team of security professionals, we can provide security and privacy advices to our customers, for free. All they have to do is drop us an email and ask “hey, how can I do [that] to secure [what] ?” and they will receive proven tips.
Are you planning on making software clients for the platforms you support (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS,…)?
Yes, definitely. We are currently developing our own VPN software and we are expecting it to be ready to go public within the following weeks.
What else do you have in the pipelines for the coming months?
More VPN servers and some unique features you won’t find elsewhere at this time. We’d like to keep that secret for now and let you and your readers know at a later date.
Anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Daniel C.
Sander D.
