How to Choose the Best VPN Service for Your Needs
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are veritable Swiss Army Knives when it comes to privacy enhancement, censorship avoidance, anonymous file sharing, and more. But not all VPNs are created equal and there’s no sense paying for features you don’t need (or paying at all if a full-fledged VPN service is overkill for your needs). Read on as we explore the ins and outs of picking a perfect VPN service.
We’re about to walk you through what VPNs are, why people use them, how to assess your VPN needs, and the important questions to ask when shopping for a VPN. If you’re impatient and you just want a really good VPN right this second, you can always jump right to the end and check out our recommendations. A thorough read from start to finish, however, will show you why we’re recommending the services we are.
What Is Virtual Private Networking?
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Through the use of software (and sometimes, at the corporate and governmental level, hardware) a VPN creates a virtualized network between two physically separate networks.
VPN use, for example, allows an IBM employee to work from home in a Chicago suburb while accessing the company intranet located in a building in New York City as if he was right there with the physical LAN hundreds of miles away. The same technology can be used by consumers to bridge their phones and laptops to their home network so, while on the road, they can securely access files from their media server or desktop computers.
VPNs also have another case use beyond bridging users securely to their own (or corporate) local networks: connecting users to the greater Internet through a secure connection such that all their traffic between their devices is routed through the tunnel to the end point so no one in between can see what is going on. Not only is their traffic secure but it will appear to originate not where they are (like Sydney) but where their VPN exit node is (like New York City).
Why Do People Use VPNs?
We used the words private and secure a lot in the previous section and that should tip you off to one of the principle draws of using a Virtual Private Network: to secure your connection and increase the privacy there of.
Many services are geographically blocked. If you’re a reader outside the US who has visited a popular YouTube video only to be informed “This video is not available in your country,” or some variant thereof, you’ve experienced geo-blocking. You’ve also experienced it if you’ve attempted to watch Netflix in a country not currently supported by Netflix.In addition to the use cases we highlighted above (securely accessing a remote network as if you were connected to the network as a local user) there are also some very valuable use cases that are more outwardly focused. Why would someone want to, as we mentioned above, use their computer in Sydney, Australia but appear (to all the websites and services they use) as if they were in the United States?
Even when you can access a service like Netflix in your country there are often incongruences between what is available in the primary market (typically the US) and the market you’re in. In addition to absent videos many people (we’re looking at you, Australians) have to deal with insanely high import taxes on software that see them paying twice (or more) what US consumers pay for the same products.
On a more serious note, an unfortunately large number of people live in countries with high levels of overt censorship and monitoring (like China) and countries with more convert monitoring (like the US); one of the best ways to get around censorship and monitoring is to use a secure tunnel to appear as if you’re from somewhere else altogether.
In addition to hiding your online activity from a snooping government it’s also useful for hiding your activity from a snooping Internet Service Provider (ISP). If your ISP likes to throttle your connection based on content (tanking your file downloads and/or streaming video speeds in the process) a VPN completely eliminates that problem as all your traffic is traveling to a single point through the encrypted tunnel and your ISP remains ignorant of what kind of traffic it is.
In short a VPN is useful anytime you want to either hide your traffic from people on your local network (like the person who controls the free Wi-Fi at the shop you’re working at), your ISP, or your government and it’s also incredibly useful to trick services into thinking you’re right next door when you’re an ocean away.
Assessing Your VPN Needs
Every user is going to have slightly different VPN needs and the best way to end up paired with the ideal VPN service for your needs is to take careful stock of what your needs are before you go shopping. You may even find you don’t need to go shopping because home-grown or router-based solutions you already have on hand fulfill your needs just fine. Let’s run through a series of questions you should ask yourself and highlight how different VPN features meet the needs highlighted by those questions.
To be clear many of the following questions can be satisfied on multiple levels by a single provider, but the questions are framed to get you thinking about what is most important for your personal use.
Do You Need Secure Access to Your Home Network?
If the only use case you care about is securely accessing your home network to gain access to local content while away from home, then you absolutely do not need to invest in a VPN service provider. This isn’t even a case of the tool being overkill for the job; it’s a case of the tool being the wrong tool for the job. A remote VPN service provider gives you secure access to a remote network (like an exit node in Amsterdam), not access to your own network.
