How to Pick a VPN Service

How to Pick a VPN Service


Paid services generally give you better performance and advanced features, but there are plenty of free VPN services from which you can choose.
The challenge (and this applies equally to both free and paid services) is figuring out when the company is actually providing a secure service and when it's using a lot of fancy words to disguise the fact that it is selling snake oil. With paid services, you can assume that a company would not risk its financial reputation with a sub-par offering. With free services, check out whether the company offers a paid version, too, and whether it offers other privacy-protecting tools. A company active in political or activism circles may inspire a bit more trust, too, if that's what you are also planning to use them for.


Free VPN services generally fall into one of two camps: ad-supported or restricted bandwidth. Some companies offer a free, ad-supported version of their paid software. Others place a monthly cap on network bandwidth, so heavy online users may find themselves locked out midway through the month. Some tell you upfront that P2P activity such as using BitTorrent is not allowed, and they will cancel your account if they suspect you of using it while connected to their service.
 
Performance is an important consideration when choosing your VPN service, especially when you're looking at free tools. Many companies offer slower servers for free services than for their paid counterparts. You may also be restricted on the number of servers you can connect to. I spent about a week testing each service at varying times of the day and from different locations to make sure we got a good idea of how the service performs overall. There is plenty of variation even among free VPN services, so it's a good idea to try a few and figure out which one you like best.

Since I can't thoroughly examine the companies' encryption claims, I rely on what I can see. This means using network tools such as Wireshark to see if the traffic is encrypted, checking whether URLs and form data are being transmitted in plaintext, and monitoring outgoing network traffic. I prefer providers that use OpenVPN—it's a standard, and it's a lot better than the common (and older) PPTP—but some free providers offer only PPTP, so this is something to keep in mind. I scrutinize the service's terms, conditions, and privacy policy. Does the privacy policy spell out what the service does, what it collects, and what it does with collected information? What does the "We don't keep any logs," promise really mean?

A decent VPN service should be easy enough to use, but even that varies across services. Some require you to download a configuration file and import it into an OpenVPN client or manually configure the VPN client built into Windows and Mac OS X. With others, you install software using a downloaded executable file.


VPN Service for Your Needs
You may wonder if you really need to worry about VPN services when you aren't sitting on a treasure trove of classified information. Maybe you don't work on a top-secret project at work, and you don't do anything secretive online—frequent visits to Facebook and Pinterest, a little YouTube and Netflix, and some shopping on Amazon and other sites. You've decided never to do online banking or check your email when on a public Wi-Fi network. Even if you frequent shopping sites, these generally use HTTPS, so payment information should be (usually) secure, and you aren't really filling out any sensitive forms online.

Consider, though, that there are eavesdropping tools which can monitor what you are doing on the network even if you are on an HTTPS page, so relying on the website being secure is not always a good idea. A big part of online security is having good habits. Get in the habit of regularly connecting online via a VPN connection and you won't have to stop and wonder if the network you happen to be using is safe or not. And if the service is free, you really don't have an excuse for not using it. The table above should help you figure out which ones fit your needs, and check below for summaries and links to full reviews. And as I said earlier, don't be afraid to try them out for yourself to find your favorite.

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