When it comes to choosing a VPN service provider there are some points which should be taken into consideration before you buy.
- Anonymity
- Speed
- Location
- Security
If you are using your VPN service for non legitimate purposes such as downloading torrents then you will want to make sure your details are safe. Today most ISP’s would not even think twice about handing your details over upon receiving a court order. What is the point of using a VPN if the company or entity providing it cant keep you safe?
Sometimes you may be lucky to find a VPN service hosted in a country which has slack copyright laws. This is not to say you will not get busted but it is certainly better than using a VPN hosted in a country with very strict copyright laws such as the United States.
No one likes a slow Internet connection! Typically VPN service providers will be serving many customers from one server or specialist VPN router, the bottleneck being the speed of the connection to that server or router.
Lets say for example company ‘x’ has a VPN server with a 100mbit dedicated pipe but there are 200 people connected to this server or router demanding 2mbit each. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that 200 x 2mbit = 400mbit! This is 4 x more bandwidth than is actually available so your connection speed will suffer as will everyone else’s.
Don’t forget that the bandwidth consumption on the server or router side is actually doubled as this is acting as a relay the server will be downloading from the requested data source and then re-uploading this to the VPN client, 2mbit actually turns into 2mbit download 2mbit upload PLUS any VPN overheads.
As mentioned before you do not want a VPN for example in the United States if you are going to be downloading torrents, you will be at a higher risk of legal action than you would if you used a VPN service in say China.
Usually a VPN client will redirect your default gateway through the VPN connection so if you have a VPN in Singapore then you visit “google.com” this will redirect to the Google Singapore edition. Some other clever websites may also translate into the native language so be aware.
There are ways round this such as running your VPN within a Virtual Server such as VMware or Windows Virtual PC.
There is no point in using a VPN if there is no security. Your traffic will still be traveling over the Internet in clear text so will still be likely shaped, filtered, blocked and what ever else usually happens before your data gets to you.
Usually the most secure VPN’s are the IPsec variety but these are also usually the most expensive. OpenVPN is a good all rounder and is usually the cheapest type too.
Conclusion
As you can see there are some vital and non vital considerations to make when buying a VPN service. Read some of our other articles for the points raised.