There are countless papers and video’s out there regarding vpn’s. There are a couple with great technical depth for the thoroughbred techies, but quite little for not so technical people out there. People who want to surf the net knowing that their privacy is protected, but don’t want to worry about drowning into too much detail on setting up and using a vpn.
So, which are the best vpn’s and why you should get one. Well yeah i totally agree a vpn increases your privacy online, but is it all what it promises it to be? Let me share with you my experience on vpn’s for the last couple of year’s and all the nitty gritties. Of course in simple plain and comprehensible english.
What is a vpn?
Virtual Private Network, simply said
“a vpn protects your internet connection by creating a secure connection (tunnel) between your device and the internet”
By doing so protecting your internet traffic from snooping, restrictions or censorship. Let me elaborate a bit more.
Secure tunnel this is an encrypted connection which makes your traffic unreadable to anybody, including hackers, your ISP (Internet Server Provider) and governments.
Device here meaning your computer, laptop, mobile phone, tablet, router, raspberry pi’s and more. All devices that connect to the internet where you can install the vpn provider software, app or packages.
Internet, well, by using the vpn software on your device a connection is established to a secure vpn server of your vpn provider. Creating a secure end to end connection which only exposes the ip-addres of the vpn provider to the site you are visiting.
Why use a vpn?
So now we know the basics on how a vpn protect our internet activities. Besides protecting our online activity and privacy there are a lot more benefits from using a good vpn.
- Change your location, by connecting to a vpn server other than your country you can bypass content or site blocking enforced at your location. This can be handy to unlock certain streaming content or get cheaper prices when ordering products from another location. Regain free access to the internet!
- Increase security, it is advisable to use a vpn when making use of public free wifi to protect yourself from hackers sniffing your activity or using man-in-the-middle attacks to compromise your device.
- Anonymity, websites you visit when using a vpn, sees the ip-address of the vpn server you are connected to. Meaning that your own ip-address is hidden from the website. And because most vpn’s never keep logs of your activity, it is hard or nearly impossible to trace your tracks. So this is one to keep an eye on if you value your only privacy.
When to use a vpn?
- Traveling either on vacation or business trip.
- Watching streaming services. To unblock filtered content or when you are in another country and want to watch content from your home country.
- When using public wifi. Always use a vpn when connected to a free wifi.
- Torrenting. By using a vpn your real ip-address is hidden.
- And one of my favorite when shopping. It does make a difference like mentioned earlier to change your connection to nearby countries when for example buying a plain ticket or some cool gadget. This can litterally save you money.
- VPN providers
Hopefully at this point you now posses the knowledge on what a vpn is and the advantages of make use of them. Before we proceed on the best VPN’s out there, let’s make a list of requirements which you may want to consider when choosing a vpn provider.
- Level of security
- User friendly application, most vpn providers have a one switch activation interface.
- Number of servers available globally
- Speed, is speeds throttled? How fast can we connect to a vpn server.
- Logging, does the vpn provider store activity logs.
- Extra features, kill switch is a good feature to watch for.
- Advanced options
- Location of the company (jurisdictions). I would like to high lite this a bit more. Some countries are legally bound to provide logging information to their governments with certain retention periods. Meaning online activity is stored and kept for a number of years for access by your government.
- Quality of support
Free:
In my years of using free and payed vpn services, i must say it’s ok to start off with a free vpn service to get a feel on using one and tryout the benefits. There a quite a couple providers like Hotspot Shield, TunnelBear and ProtonVpn which are all ok. But bear in mind when it’s free there are limits, like speed throttling (slowing down your connection), limited support, limited options, tedious setup or limited servers worldwide. So when you want to try a free VPN take the requirements above and see if these providers fits your needs.
But then again, payed vpn’s these days are so cheap for longer subscription periods that its litterally is almost free! A small price for your safety and privacy online.
Paid:
Searching for the best vpn service on the net will most likely end up with the following: ExpressVPN, NordVPN, SurfShark, IPVanish and Cyberghost.
I will not talk about all vpn providers mentioned, but high lite the first two as these are by far the best on the net which i’ve used for the last couple of years with 110% satisfaction.