VPN Review - NordVPN vs Hide.me

I've been trialling several public VPN services these last few months to see which one can handle the kind of speeds and traffic required from Australia.

The two favourites I've settled on (so far) are NordVPN and Hide.me.

A couple of important features I've been looking for:

Zero Logging: Yes.

NordVPN don't keep logs of any kind. They operate under the legal jurisdiction of Panama, where there are no data-retention laws.

Again Hide.me doesn't keep logs of any kind. Not even connection logs so there's not even any metadata to track back to dates and times of connections let alone who or where they visited.

Connection Speeds: Good.

Connection speeds vary greatly from Australia depending on the country you're connecting to (your exit-point).
Several regions are however excellent. Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and the Netherlands are all great from Australia.
Both Hide.me and NordVPN have a great list of end-points.

The NordVPN client interface will automatically scan every server and determine the servers load and latency from your location, so you can easily scan the list determine the best server to connect to.

Server Locations: Good.

Hide.me automatically detects a low utilization end-point and will connect you accordingly.

NordVPN has about 180 or so server locations and they're sorted by region and categorised by the type of connection and service they allow, making it really simple to find the best connection available for your particular category of use (TV/Movie streaming, p2p etc.).

Auto-Connect: Yes.

Connects on startup and reconnects if the connection is lost. Simple. Both NordVPN and Hide.me can be configured do this.

Kill Switch: Yes.

Not only does NordVPN provide a kill switch but it lets you terminate individual running processes if the connection is compromised. meaning you don't loose connectivity to your whole machine if the VPN drops out. This is a pretty outstanding feature, and worth considering on it's own. Hide.me offers a system-wide network kill switch only.

DNS Leak protection: Yes.

Standard feature these days, you can use the default for the connection you select or provide your own DNS server list for the connection you're using. Both services offer DNS Leak Protection as an option in their configurations. This is important if the data-retention laws in your country (Australia!) require your ISP to retain metadata (like DNS requests).