Express VPN

ExpressVPN Accepts Direct Credit Card Payments

xvwpadmin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:50:33 +0000

ExpressVPN is proud to accept all major credit cards as a direct form of payment on our site. Most of our competitors do not offer this. They force you to use online checkout services such as Plimus, 2Checkout or AltertPay in order to purchase their VPN services.

Why is this inconvenient for customers? For 3 main reasons. First, you might attempt a credit card purchase using one of these services, only to find out that the payment has been blocked because you placed the order outside of your home country. You may need to contact your credit card company or send verification documents to the checkout company just to push the order through. And that brings us to the second reason: which is that customers purchasing a VPN often value privacy and don’t want to involve a third party checkout provider with different privacy terms from the VPN company.

Finally, these checkout companies can be unreliable and cut service to the VPN provider for any number of reasons. One of our largest competitors blogged recently that Plimus was terminating their payment processing relationship. Practically as a customer this means you would have to enter a new payment method or risk having your VPN services cut if you forget to do so.

Why are we able to accept direct credit card payments when so many of our competitors can not? It is because we have been in business for a long time and have an excellent reputation as a leading VPN service provider. The credit card issuing brands (VISA, MasterCard, Amex and Discover) know this and have decided to allow ExpressVPN a direct relationship to process payments. We are able to maintain this relationship in part due to having robust fraud filtering and internal verification systems to prevent unauthorized users from signing up with stolen credit cards and abusing our network.

We also offer customers the choice of checking out with Paypal, as many of our users already have accounts there. Paypal is the world’s most popular and trusted online payment company, and we enjoy working with them. Do you have a suggestion for other forms of payment that ExpressVPN should accept? Please contact us and let us know your thoughts.

Introducing the home-screen widget for the ExpressVPN Android app

xvwpadmin — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:48:44 +0000

The ExpressVPN Android app now has a home-screen widget that makes it even faster and easier to connect to ExpressVPN. It now takes only a single tap to connect directly from your home screen.

To add the widget to your Android device:

* Make sure you’ve installed the latest version of the ExpressVPN Android app

* Tap and hold anywhere on your home screen

* Tap “Widgets”

* Tap “Express VPN”

The widget now lets you directly connect to the most recently used Express VPN location. Enjoy!

Our Reaction to SOPA/PIPA announcement

xvwpadmin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:15:55 +0000

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.

All-new version of ExpressVPN for Mac – Upgrade Now

xvwpadmin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:56:25 +0000

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:

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

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

Log into our customer portal
Click “View VPN Account Details”
In the section “Default ExpressVPN Account”, click on the link to download our Mac application
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.

Announcing several new server locations

xvwpadmin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:55:40 +0000

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

Singapore
Italy
Ireland
Poland
Lithuania
Czech Republic
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.

Announcing the new ExpressVPN for Windows – Upgrade Now

xvwpadmin — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 12:42:39 +0000

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

Easier to use
Faster connections
More server choices

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

Log into our customer portal
Click “View VPN Account Details”
In the section “Default ExpressVPN Account”, click on the link to download the application
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.

Announcing live VPN chat support

xvwpadmin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 09:29:11 +0000

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.

New ExpressVPN “superhero” site design

xvwpadmin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 02:32:10 +0000

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

ExpressVPN service is up and running normally after the Japan earthquake

xvwpadmin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:41:51 +0000

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.

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

xvwpadmin — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 11:49:59 +0000

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.