Using a private VPN has many great reasons. Here are a list of 5 reasons why using a personal VPN to surf the web is good for your online privacy.
Your Location is Hidden
When you visit websites, often your geo-location is tracked for analytics. IPs can often be tracked to a specific region in the world. They can also be owned by a person or organization. For instance, when someone edits a Wikipedia article, the IP is saved. This can be tracked to discover a specific company or organization has made the edit. By using a personal VPN, the IP you come from is that of the VPN provider and not your true IP. This is helpful for staying anonymous online.
Encrypted WiFi Traffic
When connecting to the internet from an airport or a coffee shop using the WiFi, how do you know the facility isn’t snooping on all of your communications? It’s even possible for other people in that area to pick up on your communication too. When you use a VPN, your traffic is encrypted between your computer and the VPN provider. This makes it very difficult and usually impossible for the coffee shop or airport to snoop on your data.
Bypass Proxies
Some networks require all web traffic to go through a proxy before going to the internet. This is to restrict you from going to places they don’t want you to go to. Using a VPN let’s you bypass this since all your traffic out of your network is now encrypted.
ISPs Can’t Tell What You’re Doing
Some ISPs like Comcast will filter your traffic depending on what you’re doing. They’ve been known to slow down Netflix connections or throttle downloads to specific sites. Because the traffic between your computer and your VPN provider is encrypted, the ISP has no idea what is in the traffic now. They may be able to tell you’re going through a VPN but that’s all they know. This gives you the power to do more without having to deal with a shady ISP.
Get By Country Blocking
The internet should be open for anyone. This isn’t true, because some countries block specific communications in or out of their country. There’s also certain content on YouTube and Netflix that is only available in certain regions of the world. When you use a personal VPN, you can choose where you want your connection to come from, which can bypass certain country restrictions.
Choosing The Right VPN Provider
Not all VPN providers are good. Some are outright evil and can capture all the traffic coming through their servers. Here’s some tips on choosing a good VPN provider.
There are no good free providers
The free providers are the worst. They have slow servers, can’t be trusted, and may not even work. If you find a free VPN provider, do not use it for privacy reasons.
Make sure they are private
VPN providers supply privacy. They should respect yours. You shouldn’t need to give them a name or any information about you other than what login you want to use and how to pay them.
Anonymous payments
Paying anonymously to a VPN provider is nice. See if the provider accepts bitcoin payments which are anonymous.
Numerous servers
Having numerous servers all over the world is helpful. You may want some close to you or far away from you. The more options the better it is for you. Try to find someone with at least 50 servers worldwide.
Fast servers
The VPN server you connect to should have a low latency and fast processing time. The faster this is, the faster your connections will be through it. You’ll want to find servers under 100 ms response times.
Mobile friendly
Some VPN providers also create an app for mobile devices so you can surf privately there too. This is a nice feature to have.
My Recommendation
I’ve done significant research on personal VPN providers for myself. I’ve also talked to a lot of security minded individuals since I am a network security engineer. After all of my research my top choice is:
In fact, I like it so much, that I have become an affiliate of theirs. I stand by their product and service and highly recommend you give them a try if you want to use a personal VPN.
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I also want to make sure you’re happy with the service so if you have any questions about the software at all, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll be glad to help you get the most of your software.
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