With more and more people spending much of their lives online these days, privacy is becoming a concern for many users. We often send information in emails and instant messaging (IM) chats that we would hate to see posted in the public domain. Unfortunately, public WiFi hotspots, internet cafes, and even public libraries are vulnerable to security breaches and theft of your internet traffic. Not to mention that different governments around the world often have laws that allow law enforcement agencies to monitor all of your transmitted web traffic.
A VPN for more security
For security and privacy conscious users, they do not need to live in a cave to avoid these potentially dangerous environments to use the internet. You can use what is known as a virtual private network (VPN) to safely route all Internet traffic from your computer to its final destination. This VPN acts as a virtual tunnel for your data to pass through privately, encrypting every bit and byte along the way.
Use VPN to access geocentric resources
One of the added benefits of using such a VPN to route your internet traffic is that the VPN server, which creates the tunnel for you, will display whatever website or service you visit with the IP address of its own server. Where this is particularly useful is when you are outside of the United States and trying to access an online service that restricts its use to only US residents, or is blocked by the country from which you are connecting. that is, in China, the government’s Great Firewall of China blocks access to popular US sites like Facebook and YouTube.
Sometimes it may not be a country, but maybe even your university network does not allow you to access certain external websites. As long as you can connect to your VPN, you will be able to bypass such restrictions.
Choosing a VPN provider
To meet the demand, more and more companies are providing Virtual Private Network services for a monthly fee. I have personal experience using HMA, StrongVPN, and Witopia. I would also rank them in that order of quality. If you are looking to access online services from a certain country, all of the above providers offer multiple geographically located VPN servers for you to connect. You should not expect to pay more than $ 100 per year for such a service.
VPN speed issues
I think speed issues when using a VPN are highly dependent on the VPN provider you choose. The method your company uses to “tunnel” your data and encrypt it end-to-end can add increased packet overhead to every data transmission you make. On the other hand, at least HMA claims to compress some data packets for you, which may even speed up transmissions more than if you weren’t using the VPN.
Geographically, you should expect a longer delay if you are accessing your neighbor’s computer through VPN rather than without it. Although if you are primarily accessing websites in a location on the other side of the world, going through a VPN server closer to that location should speed things up for you overall. The reason for this is that the data you send and receive is generally passed between many different servers to communicate with you. However, when using a VPN, a more direct route is established.
VPN for your peace of mind
In short, VPNs offer increased security, privacy, and in some cases speed for all your internet traffic. If you can value your information and security, I’m sure the cost of a VPN for a year is much less.